You know which division is decidedly not the NL West?

Well, all five of the others if you want to be technical. But especially not the American League Central, which is off to a stinky start in 2025.

At the start of play on Sunday, not one team in the AL Central was over .500. The Detroit Tigers (4-4) were the only one that was so much as even with that level, while the Cleveland Guardians, Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins were 3-5 and the Chicago White Sox were 2-6.

This is the same AL Central that not only sent three teams to the playoffs in 2024, but we also saw all three of them win at least one series. So, what the heck is going on here?

Some of it is probably inevitable regression to the mean, though there's also the question of how talented these teams were to begin with. Per FanGraphs , only the Twins began the year with better than a 50 percent chance of making the playoffs.