The Windup Newsletter ⚾ | This is The Athletic’s MLB newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Windup directly in your inbox.Let’s try to make sense of that AL West maelstrom, shall we? Plus: We ponder some leadoff home run records, Andy McCullough’s mailbag answers a Brewers deadline question and we have a slam dunk winner for toughest player of the year. I’m Levi Weaver — welcome to The Windup!AL West: The division conundrumLast night, the Rangers beat the White Sox 10-0, the Mariners lost 4-2 to the Reds and the Astros beat the Marlins 5-3. That means, after a one-day flip-flop, Texas is back in first place in the AL, with the Mariners a half-game back and Houston down three games. Oh and by the way, the Rangers are just one game over .500, at 51-50.The A’s (eight games back) and Angels (10.5) are, barring a miracle, finished. But the top three — the Rangers, Mariners and Astros — make up this deadline’s most perplexing riddle. One has to win the division. Is it worth trading prospects to marginally improve a .500 team with long October odds?The answer may lie less in the teams’ records come Aug. 3, and more on what they can even afford. Combining the organizational rankings of our own Keith Law, FanGraphs, MLB, Bleacher Report, Baseball Prospectus ($), Baseball America ($) and ESPN, here’s where their farm systems rank, on average, out of 30 teams:Astros: 28.57