Five reasons the AL Central has become MLB's weakest division, from player development to payrolls
Six American League clubs currently have a higher winning percentage than the best team in the AL Central
If the 2023 MLB regular season ended today, an AL Central team would be in the postseason only because the rules say an AL Central team has to go to the postseason. Six American League clubs have a higher winning percentage than the best team in the AL Central, and four of the league's five worst teams call that division home.
Here are the AL Central standings entering play Wednesday:
| Record | Games behind | Run Differential | |
|---|---|---|---|
60-55 | -- | +47 | |
55-59 | 4.5 | -5 | |
50-63 | 9 | -105 | |
46-69 | 14 | -96 | |
37-78 | 23 | -160 | |
TOTAL | 248-321 | -- | -319 |
In terms of run differential, the next worst division is the NL Central at minus-70. It's unlikely but not impossible every team in the AL Central will finish with a losing record, something that has never happened in history. At least one team has finished with a winning record in every division in every season ever. For it to happen, Minnesota needs to go no better than 20-27 in their final 47 games while the other four teams remain status quo.
Furthermore, the AL Central's lack of recent postseason success is stunning. Since the Guardians took a 3-1 lead over the Cubs in the 2016 World Series, the five AL Central teams are a combined 8-25 in the postseason. The AL Central's only postseason series win since 2016 is Cleveland's two-game sweep of the Rays in last year's Wild Card Series. The Twins are riding an 18-game losing streak in the postseason dating back to 2004, the longest postseason losing streak in the history of the four major North American sports leagues.
The AL Central is the game's weakest division and it is not a recent phenomenon either. Since the Astros moved from the NL Central to the AL West in 2013, the AL Central has a .481 winning percentage, which is a 78-win pace in a 162-game season. That's the worst winning percentage of the six divisions since 2013.
| Division | Winning percentage since 2013 | 162-game pace |
|---|---|---|
AL East | .5223 | 85-77 |
NL Central | .5033 | 82-80 |
AL West: | .5029 | 82-80 |
NL West | .5018 | 81-81 |
NL East | .4891 | 79-83 |
AL Central | .4805 | 78-84 |
The AL Central is the game's worst division this season and it has been so for the last decade. Things like that don't happen by accident. Here are five reasons the AL Central lags behind the other five divisions both this year and over the last several years.
1. The new schedule
As part of MLB's new, more balanced schedule, every team plays every other team at least once each season. Interleague play no longer rotates through divisions and now fans in, say, Pittsburgh don't have to wait three years to see their Pirates on the same field as Shohei Ohtani. The new schedule is a good thing for baseball overall and it's good for competitive balance as well.
To make the new schedule work, MLB cut down on the number of intradivision games and replaced them with interleague games. Now every team plays the other four teams in its division 13 times each rather than 19. That means AL Central teams don't get to beat up on each other as much, and have to venture out and play more games against the rest of the league.
Here is each division's record when playing outside the division this season (AL Central teams against non-AL Central teams, etc.):
| Division | Record outside division |
|---|---|
AL East | 231-164 (.585) |
NL East | 217-198 (.523) |
NL West | 209-204 (.506) |
AL West | 201-204 (.496) |
NL Central | 195-207 (.485) |
AL Central | 157-233 (.402) |
Things have not gone well for AL Central teams when they play outside their division, and the new schedule means they have to do so more often. An additional 24 times per team, in fact, or nearly 15% of the season. FanGraphs preseason projections pegged the Twins as a true talent 83-win team, which was good enough to top the AL Central. These five not-really-great teams are getting exposed the more they play outside the division.
Of course, the new schedule is, well, new, and it only helps explain the AL Central's competitive issues in 2023. Other more deep-rooted problems have dragged the division down the last several seasons.
2. Small-market limitations
To be fair to four of the five AL Central teams, they play in smaller media markets. The only exception is the White Sox. The AL Central is home to MLB's 3rd (Chicago), 14th (Detroit), 15th (Minneapolis), 18th (Cleveland), and 23rd (Kansas City) largest media markets, per Sports Media Watch. Small market means fewer resources, and fewer resources equals a smaller margin of error. This is just a fact of life. Generally speaking, the AL Central is a small-market division.
That all said, the Padres have shown small market is a mindset. Every team and every owner is fabulously wealthy, and it is 100% fair to ask why the White Sox rank only 13th in payroll this year and 17th (!) in payroll since 2013. Andrew Benintendi's five-year, $75 million contract is the largest contract in franchise history. A team based in literally Chicago never giving out a nine-figure contract is not a small-market problem. That's an ownership problem. That's a commitment to winning problem.
The Tigers have slashed their payroll from $199.8 million in 2017 to $122.2 million in 2023. The Royals maxed out at $143 million in 2017; this year it's $92.5 million. The Twins, to their credit, are the only AL Central team to consistently push payroll upward. Their $153.7 million payroll this year is a franchise record, breaking the record set last year ($134.4 million). They still only rank 17th in payroll, but spending does continue to go up. That's how it's supposed to work with league revenues increasing each year.
Here is each AL Central team's payroll rank over the last five seasons, per Cot's Baseball Contracts. Normally I would omit the bizarre 2020 pandemic season, but season payrolls were set long before COVID hit that year.
| Guardians | Royals | Tigers | Twins | White Sox | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2019 | 19th | 24th | 22nd | 18th | 26th |
2020 | 24th | 26th | 21st | 18th | 17th |
2021 | 29th | 22nd | 24th | 16th | 15th |
2022 | 27th | 23rd | 17th | 18th | 7th |
2023 | 25th | 24th | 19th | 17th | 13th |
Out of 25 individual team seasons, that's one season in the top 10, 11 in the middle 10, and 13 in the bottom 10. On only three occasions in the last five seasons has an AL Central team ranked in the top half of the league in payroll (White Sox from 2021-23). Big spenders these teams are not. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is the most frugal division in baseball.
The White Sox hamstring themselves by behaving like a small-market team. The other four AL Central teams are actually smaller market teams and being a smaller market team does come with limitations. It's not as easy to paper over your mistakes with free agents in a small market. Are these teams spending to their full capability? Almost certainly not. I'm not sure any team is these days, but even spending to their full capability would put them at a disadvantage given their market restrictions.
3. Player development speed bumps
From 2015-18, AL Central teams held seven top-10 draft picks, and it is not a pretty list:
| Player | Team | Drafted | Career WAR |
|---|---|---|---|
LHP Tyler Jay | Twins | No. 6 in 2015 | Never reached MLB |
RHP Carson Fulmer | White Sox | No. 8 in 2015 | -1.2 |
RHP Matt Manning | Tigers | No. 9 in 2016 | 0.5 |
White Sox | No. 10 in 2016 | -1.3 | |
SS Royce Lewis | Twins | No. 1 in 2017 | 1.1 |
RHP Casey Mize | Tigers | No. 1 in 2018 | 2.8 |
White Sox | No. 4 in 2018 | 3.6 |
There is still time for several of those players to have long careers, but, right now, there is not a single above-average big leaguer in that group. Other recent high draft picks by AL Central teams, like Andrew Vaughn (No. 3 to White Sox in 2019) and Spencer Torkelson (No. 1 to Tigers in 2020), have yet to emerge as impact players. The Royals had four of the top-40 picks in 2018, used all four on highly regarded college pitchers, and only one has developed into a mainstay (Brady Singer).
Trades matter as well. The J.D. Martinez, Justin Upton, and Justin Verlander trades in 2017 were total losses for the Tigers. Just a disastrous series of moves for the franchise. Michael Kopech and Yoán Moncada are nice players, but not the difference-makers the White Sox hoped when they were acquired as the headliners in the Chris Sale trade. More recently, the Twins got the worst of the Jorge López and Tyler Mahle trades. Even Cleveland's return in the Francisco Lindor trade isn't looking so hot at the moment.
The Astros and Cubs are cited as rebuild success stories and understandably so, though the flip side features teams like the Royals and Tigers, who have been rebuilding for a better part of the decade and don't seem particularly close to a postseason berth. The White Sox rebuild netted one wild-card berth (2020) and one division title (2021), and now they're back to selling again. Maybe calling these failed rebuilds is a bit strong, but these clubs are not where they expected to be when they started the rebuild process.
When you don't run big payrolls, you have to be on point with your player development, and there have been a lot of high profile hiccups in the AL Central the last few years. It's not just high draft picks though. It's missing on trades, not getting enough out of international free agency, and not building enough organizational depth in the late rounds of the draft. Cleveland has been, by far, the best player development team in the AL Central the last several years. The rest of the division lags, in some cases significantly.
4. They don't push each other to get better
The AL Central being a weak division is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your internal projections say it will take, say, 89 wins to win the division, why bother investing the resources to build a 96-win roster? You don't have to be a juggernaut to win the AL Central. You just have to be pretty good. Then, once you get to the postseason, anything can happen in a short series. We see it every year.
To win the NL West, you have to go through the Dodgers, who combine a large payroll with small market savvy. The Dodgers push the Giants and Padres to get better. The Rays have become so smart out of necessity: it's the only way they'll keep up with the big market behemoths in the AL East. The NL East has the Braves and Steven Cohen's Mets. The AL West has the well-oiled machine that is the Astros. There is no standout team in the AL Central forcing the other clubs to keep up. Good enough is good enough.
5. The ebb and flow of baseball
Just about everything in this game is cyclical, and just because the AL Central is the sport's weakest division in 2023 does not mean it will be the sport's weakest division in 2024 or 2025 or 2030. Go back a decade to 2013 and the AL Central was 210-220 against all other divisions with a plus-3 run differential. That's obviously not great, but it's way better than 2023, for sure.
In any given season -- or really in any given decade -- one of the six divisions has to be the worst division in baseball, and it is the AL Central's turn right now. Wait a few years and chances are some other division will be looking up at the rest of the league. That's baseball. Give it some time and everything will look completely different.
