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MLB Regular Season Wrap: Game 162 Pays the Favorites, the Section Signs Off, and October Opens Tuesday
The 2026 MLB regular season is over: Houston wins the AL West at 81-81 from 11 games under .500, Texas goes home, Philadelphia beats Tampa Bay 7-3 to claim the last wild card, and the desk's daily MLB market coverage wraps with the bracket finally set.
The 162-game marathon ended yesterday, and — true to the way this desk has covered it all season — the final day paid the favorites and punished the hopeful. With the regular season complete, the daily MLB market coverage that has run alongside it since March signs off here. The bracket below is what the ledger agreed to.
Game 162, settled
AL West: Houston completes the strangest division win in baseball history. The Astros beat Oakland behind Tatsuya Imai, who struck out Denzel Clarke to seal it (MLB) — the franchise's eighth division title in ten seasons and its most improbable: a club that sat eleven games under .500 at its low point finishes 81-81, the first division champion ever to spend the season's balance underwater (StatMuse). Texas, needing a win and a Houston loss, lost at Minnesota and misses the postseason entirely (CBS Sports). The parlay we priced at 33% never came close.
NL wild card: Philadelphia holds. The Phillies beat Tampa Bay 7-3 at Citizens Bank Park — Jhoan Duran striking out Nick Fortes to end it (MLB) — and the Diamondbacks' season died with it. Philadelphia's losing stretch made the race real; Game 162 made it academic. The 87.4% favorite finished the job. Arizona's October odds, +15000 on Friday, expire worthless, and Torey Lovullo's future is now a front-office question.
One correction to our own final-day board, in the open: yesterday's market board named the Mets as the Phillies' finale opponent; it was the Rays. The clinch conditions, tiebreaker asymmetries, and prices were unaffected — the opponent line was wrong, the market read was not. The note stands on the original post as well.
The final bracket
- AL wild card (Tuesday): White Sox at Astros · Red Sox at Yankees
- NL wild card (Tuesday): Phillies at Braves · Cubs at Padres
- ALDS byes: Rays, Guardians · NLDS byes: Brewers, Dodgers
Full schedule via ESPN.
The wrap
What this section tried to do, from Opening Day to Game 162, was treat baseball the way the Scorecast treats everything: games as markets, standings as a ledger, tiebreakers as pre-priced options. The final weekend was the thesis in miniature — a 67/33 parlay, an 87/13 conditional, a division title settling at exactly .500 — and the market's prices were right on all of it. The regular-season desk closes with the record it earned: right more often than wrong, wrong in the open when it was wrong, and never once confusing a narrative for a number.
The postseason opens Tuesday. If the desk picks the playoff series up, it will say so here; otherwise, the MLB section rests at 162-0 — one full season, logged. Bring your own pencil.
Records and prices verified against final standings; playoff coverage resumes only if announced on this page.