Several Red Sox players merit consideration as the team’s most valuable. Wilyer Abreu. Willson Contreras. Sonny Gray. Ceddanne Rafaela. Payton Tolle. The Boston Globe lists the candidates and then sets the list aside, because the most valuable thing Boston had going for it this season was never on the roster. It was the rest of the American League.

Consider the arithmetic of collapse. This year’s AL will produce just two 90-game winners, the Rays and the Yankees — tied with 1998 and 2015 for the fewest in a full season since baseball expanded to 30 teams in 1998. Entering the final day of the regular season, ten teams hold sub-.500 records, likewise tied for the most in league history over that span. It had happened once before, in 2017.

Never before has the modern American League featured so few elite teams and so many bad ones at the same time. In either league, there is exactly one precedent: the 2006 National League, ten teams under .500 and a single 90-game winner.

In another year, the Sox — dreadful for three months, determined to wait out their own turnaround — might have sold in June. They didn’t have to. One member of the team described the math to the Globe with unusual candor: “At the end of June, it was like, ‘We’ve got two weeks here to go on some type of a decent run [by the All-Star break to avoid a deadline selloff].’ [But] the AL sucked so bad that it didn’t have to be [anything spectacular]. We needed, like, a 10-3.”

They got a 32-5 run instead, historic by any measure, and by mid-August the playoff berth was all but assured.

Fill in the blank

The Globe offered evaluators, granted anonymity for candor, a Mad Libs proposition: the 2026 American League is __________. The answers came back like a diagnosis. “Imbalanced.” “Top-heavy.” “Wide open.” “Mid” — volunteered, the Globe notes, multiple times. “Mediocre.” “A dumpster fire of teams that all operate and build rosters the same way.” “Vastly inferior — 9-10 NL teams would make the playoffs in the AL.”

The top-heavy case rests on the East, which will send three teams to the postseason holding the three best records in the league, the first time one division has done that since the 1998 expansion. Only once before in this era had any division claimed its league’s top three: the 2015 NL Central, whose Cardinals, Pirates and Cubs each won at least 97 games. Entering the final day, three AL teams have 87 wins or more — all of them in the East. Nobody in the Central or West will reach the mark, and the Central’s champion, a mid-80s win team, will receive a first-round bye for the trouble.

And yet at the summit there are no super teams. The three best run differentials in baseball — the Brewers, the Dodgers, the Cubs — all belong to the National League. Either the Rangers or the Astros will claim the AL West with the worst winning percentage ever recorded by a division winner. The league as a whole entered Saturday at a collective .490, scraping the bottom of the 30-team era: the 2024 AL also finished at .490, and the 2006 NL at .489.

The offense tells the same story in a lower register. AL teams average 4.34 runs per game; the NL sits at 4.61. The top four scoring offenses in the sport are National, six of the top seven, along with three of the five best pitching staffs. A league with thin margins and thin star power, where a decent fortnight could pass for a resurrection.

The bracket finishes the thought. The Red Sox and Yankees play the Wild Card Series in New York, and the winner draws Tampa Bay — which means the AL East devours itself in the first two rounds and the ALCS is guaranteed one of the Guardians, the White Sox, the Astros or the Rangers. It is hard to read the standings without noticing that the postseason, on this side of the sport, has become a raffle among the unremarkable.

This, the Globe suggests, is what parity looks like: a slog of a regular season, an anything-is-possible October, and one historic surge to separate the merely alive from the merely present. Ask the evaluators what the 2026 American League is, and more than once they reached for a single syllable. “Mid.”