Welcome to the backward world of the American League, where a first-place team fired its general manager, the reigning pennant winners are in fifth place, a team in the thick of the playoff hunt traded away its Cy Young-winning ace, and the Cleveland Guardians are once again acting as agents of chaos.In a year the gap between the National League and American League feels wider than ever, the possibility of at least one sub-.500 team making the playoffs looms large. This has never happened in a non-shortened season, an indictment of the AL’s quality but also of the expanded playoff and altered schedule that has helped create a jumbled mess on the junior circuit.The irony in all of that? The weakest teams in the playoff hunt may have the best path to postseason success. The league could be careening toward a potential postseason crisis: a bracket in which qualifying with a worse seed is obviously preferable — a world where the relatively strong New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Rays and Boston Red Sox must fight one another to advance, while whoever survives among the Chicago White Sox, Houston Astros, Guardians or another barely-.500 team limps its way into the American League Championship Series.“The American League has been interesting, to say the least, this year,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said.The league is filled with teams that have underachieved (Detroit Tigers, Toronto Blue Jays) and others that seem caught in identity crises (Houston Astros, Texas Rangers, Baltimore Orioles).Perhaps no team has been more frustrating than the Seattle Mariners, who were one win away from reaching the World Series last season and returned a loaded rotation, plus positional star power in Julio Rodríguez and Cal Raleigh. In August, though, the Mariners went 11-16. They lost a game in part because of a bizarre play on which a pitcher did not apply a tag at home plate after a wild pitch. They also got thumped by scores of 11-0, 22-0 and 19-2.The Mariners’ woes have put manager Dan Wilson on the hot seat and cast more ire toward president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto. Dipoto happens to be the man who uttered one of the most infamous quotes from baseball’s executive class in recent years, the “54 percent” comment that has been the subject of so much scorn.“If you go back and you look, in a decade those teams that win 54 percent of the time always wind up in the postseason,” Dipoto said in 2023. “And they more often than not wind up in the World Series. So, there’s your bigger-picture process. Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, ‘We’re going to win 54 percent of the time.’ … But over time, that type of mindset gets you there.”The comment once served as a reflection on a deeper issue in the sport. A perception exists that some teams are not trying to win as many games as possible each year. Rather, efficiency has become their god. Clubs could game the system, limit their spending and do the bare minimum needed to get into the postseason.A couple of years later? Well, a .540 winning percentage would look good on the Mariners, who sit eight games below .500. It would also represent an upgrade for all but three teams — the Rays, Yankees and Red Sox — in the American League. Only Tampa and New York are on pace to win 88 or more games.So as we enter the season’s stretch run, the dismal state of the AL has created a sluggish hunt in which teams are hopping in a sack race toward the finish line.Some of this feels like a referendum on the league’s divisional structure. Particularly in the Central and West divisions, there is no spending behemoth upping the ante for the rest of the division. With the resurgence of the Orioles and Blue Jays, the last-place team in the AL East might end the season with a better record than the winner of the AL West.MLB’s move to an expanded playoff in 2022, paired with the expansion of interleague play, partly created this conundrum. Rather than spurring action because more teams are in the race, clubs have acted more cautiously. The bar for a playoff berth is lower. Fifty-four percent will do just fine.Because the teams elbowing for playoff spots are playing each other only on occasion, the number of interleague games creates the possibility of a sub-.500 team making the playoffs. The AL is 45 games under .500 against the NL this season.