Regardless of which team from Texas wins the AL West, it will be historic, but maybe not for the right reasons. While I still haven't fully forgiven the Astros for 2017, I did think it was pretty hilarious that owner Jim Crane went on record saying that it didn't matter his team had cheated because the team was so good they would've won anyway. 

All that aside, the real juice of this article is a look at how both Texas and Houston will make history this season... by winning their division with a negative run differential. With three games left to play each, the Rangers anxiously sport a -40 run differential, and the Astros are lugging around a remarkable -51. 

Given just these two numbers, my money would be on Texas to win the division, but getting baseball down to one number is very difficult, no matter how hard many smart people try; sometimes I think WAR was just invented to help MLB market Mike Trout.

Naturally, I wanted to see how rare this was, and it's actually quite rare. I used Screwball to help me find that only 12 teams with negative r-diffs have even made the playoffs. If we cut out the shortened 2020 season (these teams are displayed in lighter font in the table below), that number goes down by 25% to only nine teams (Honorable mention to the Reds, who made the playoffs in 2020 with an r-diff of exactly zero).

Of those nine non-COVID teams, six of them were division winners (denoted with an asterisk in the table): the 2025 Guardians, 2005 Padres, 2007 Diamondbacks, 1997 Giants, 1987 Twins, 1984 Royals. If the Astros theoretically finished the season and won the division today, they would have the lowest run differential ever of a division winner, and the second lowest ever of a playoff team; Texas would be second for a division winner, and third for a playoff team. 

Out of the nine times it's happened, 33% have occurred in the last three years, with this year's final pushing those number to 10 times, and 40%. While we can blame expanded playoffs for this to a degree, we can't logically use that when a division winner has a negative r-diff, like Cleveland did last year and the AL West winner will this year. That's two years in a row of something that only happened eight times in baseball history before 2025.

So, what causes this to occur? It's not always super easy to tell. For example, the Guardians in 2025 played great defense with no offense, whereas the Astros in 2026 have decent offense but precipitous run prevention, and the Rangers are in the more of a middle area. It's usually more indicative of a lucky team being pushed to the top of a weak division, though that wasn't the case in 2007. The Diamondbacks won the NL West with a -20 r-diff, with the Rockies coming in second by half a game, despite sporting a r-diff of +103. However, the Rockies would end up knocking out the Diamondbacks in a legendary winner-take-all Wild Card playoff contest that ended with a score of 9-8 after 13 innings.

Now that we've seen something like this happen two years in a row, I wonder if this is the new normal. It will be interesting to keep tabs on how teams with negative run differentials perform in the playoffs. 

Of the 12 teams listed above, only one has ever gone on to win the World Series; the 1987 Minnesota Twins. They did finish with a winning record and Kirby Puckett, two things that neither the Rangers or Astros currently have.