AL Pennant Odds 2026: The Model's Post-Deadline Board Vs. Kalshi

Updated August 6, 2026, with live post-deadline prices, the full trade ledger, and Eric Lindquist's trade-moves read. Panel verdicts were generated August 1, price-blind, and are unchanged.

The verdicts on this page were a photograph. The trade deadline turned out to be a movie. We put the full 15-team American League pennant board in front of an eight-model AI panel on August 1, price-blind, with the fetched standings, run differentials, and the transaction ledger as it stood that morning. Then the deadline's real wave hit: over the next 48 hours the ledger logged the Adley Rutschman blockbuster, a White Sox buying spree (our own Eric Lindquist flagged the Brazobán piece of it the night it broke), and a club still inside the wild-card picture trading away its ace. Kalshi's AL pennant market, now about 4.2 million contracts traded, spent five days repricing all of it. This refresh keeps the panel's numbers exactly as generated, updates every price to the live board, and walks through what the deadline actually did, including the one move the market repriced hardest, which went to a different uniform than the rumor mill had it in.

The Quick Answer

Kalshi still makes the New York Yankees the AL pennant favorite, now at 22.5 cents against the panel's 23.2% blend, as close to a market match as this series produces. The story since the verdicts is the second tier: Boston nearly doubled from 10.5 to 20 cents after landing Adley Rutschman and running its winning streak to seven, Texas collapsed from 9.5 to 3.5 cents, and Seattle's price came two cents toward the panel's fade. The models' standing disagreement is untouched: their August 1 blend put the Chicago White Sox at 14.1% against a price that still sits at 8.5 cents, and Chicago spent the deadline buying like a team that agrees. The full 15-contract board, the reprice table, and the deadline ledger are below.

The Market At A Glance

Venue	Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange (18+; availability varies by state, as of August 2026)
The Event	"American League Champion" (Kalshi event KXMLBAL-26), 15 contracts, one per AL club, a complete partition
The Contract	Settlement rule, quoted from the Yankees contract: "If New York Y win the 2026 Pro Baseball American League Championship, then the market resolves to Yes"
Settlement	The pennant is decided in the ALCS; the postseason begins September 28, 2026, and the contracts carry a listed expiration of November 1, 2026 (UTC)
Volume	About 4.2 million contracts traded across the event
Live Prices As Of	August 6, 2026, 13:00 UTC (order-book mids); panel verdicts generated August 1, 2026, price-blind

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi event contracts trade on a CFTC-regulated exchange; you must be 18 or older and in an eligible state to participate.

What The Deadline Actually Did

The panel's card carried the AL trades logged through the morning of August 1. The transactions ledger then got very loud, very fast: its heaviest 48 hours were logged August 2 and 3, after the verdicts were in. Eric Lindquist's ask, sent while the window was still open, already had the two threads that mattered in it: Adley Rutschman tied up in trade talks (with the Yankees, at the time) and the White Sox landing Huascar Brazobán that night; his trade-moves angle runs through this section. The key AL moves from the ledger, club by club:

• Boston Landed The Blockbuster. Baltimore sent Adley Rutschman, Jake Rogers, and cash to the Red Sox on August 3 for a four-player return plus a player to be named. Boston also added Eli White from Atlanta while moving Marcelo Mayer to San Francisco. The catcher the rumor mill spent a week fitting for pinstripes ended up in the other AL East uniform, a third-act twist M. Night Shyamalan would have called a bit much, and one piece of fine print matters for the price: Rutschman arrived still on the 10-day injured list (left wrist inflammation, retroactive to July 19) with no announced return date in the ledger, so the market is pricing when he comes back, not what he does this weekend.
• Chicago Went Full Supermarket Sweep. The White Sox added Luis Castillo from Seattle on August 2, then Brazobán from the Mets, Joey Bart from Atlanta, and Brenton Doyle from Colorado on August 3, all on top of the José Urquidy add from July 26. In eight days a division leader added a rotation headliner, a leverage reliever, a catcher, and a center fielder. The honest asterisk: Castillo arrives at 3-9 with a 5.06 ERA, so Chicago is buying the name and the track record, not the 2026 stat line.
• Tampa Bay Added Rotation Help, taking Freddy Peralta from the Mets on August 2 (a former front-line arm, 5-9 with a 4.99 ERA in his Mets innings and 5.37 on the season) and adding Liam Hicks, Tyler Wells, and Jack Suwinski around him.
• Detroit Sold, And Not Small. The Tigers sent Tarik Skubal (2.79 ERA in Detroit this year) to the Dodgers on August 2 for a three-prospect package and moved Casey Mize (2.70 as a Tiger) to San Diego the next day. A club still in the thick of the wild-card race traded its two best starters.
• New York Shopped The Aisles, Not The Showcase. Heliot Ramos in from San Francisco, Luis García Jr. in from Washington, Camilo Doval out to Pittsburgh. No Rutschman, no rotation add.
• Seattle Sold Its Rotation Headliner, sending Castillo to Chicago for a return built around Seranthony Domínguez and Nolan Jones, while taking Taylor Ward back from Baltimore.
• Minnesota's Earlier Buys Stand (A.J. Minter on July 31, Dean Kremer on August 1), as do Texas's (Logan O'Hoppe and Chase Silseth from the Angels on July 29, though depth infielder Josh Smith went out to Toronto on August 3) and Houston's early sales (Lance McCullers Jr. in July, Nate Pearson to Kansas City).
• Baltimore Held A Fire Sale: Rutschman, Ward, Kremer, and Johnathan Rodríguez all out in the space of a week, the Ocean's Eleven ending where the whole crew walks off in different directions.

Eric's pre-deadline frame was that the Yankees were the club whose pennant odds the window could move most, in either direction, with Rutschman as the swing piece. The board's answer is the interesting part, and it is where his lens and the market split: New York's price barely moved.

The Reprice: What Five Days Did To The Board

Seven contracts moved a cent or more between the verdict snapshot and the live board:

Club	Aug 1	Aug 6	Move	What the market repriced
Boston Red Sox	10.5¢	20¢	+9.5	Rutschman, plus a seven-game winning streak (9-1 in the last ten)
Texas Rangers	9.5¢	3.5¢	-6.0	Selling Josh Smith days after buying, and slipping under .500 (57-58 through August 5)
Seattle Mariners	10.5¢	8.5¢	-2.0	Trading Luis Castillo mid-race (56-59 through August 5)
Tampa Bay Rays	16.5¢	18¢	+1.5	Peralta, and the AL's best record at 68-46
Baltimore Orioles	2.5¢	1¢	-1.5	The teardown
Minnesota Twins	2.5¢	1.5¢	-1.0	Four straight losses and a slide to 56-59
New York Yankees	23.5¢	22.5¢	-1.0	A quiet deadline while the team behind them got loud

The row worth staring at is Boston's, because it is the one place the live board has blown past the panel rather than converged with it. The models blended the Red Sox at 12.6% on August 1, a mild lean over the 10.5-cent price of the time. That number never saw Rutschman in a Boston uniform and never saw the streak; the market's 20 cents is pricing information the panel did not have. Treat the Boston gap in the table below as a stale verdict, not a fresh fade. The Texas and Seattle rows are the opposite case: the panel faded both, and the market has since cut Texas by nearly two-thirds and shaved two cents off Seattle, with the deadline handing the market the same evidence the run differentials had already handed the models.

The Board: All 15 Contracts

Sorted by the panel's blend, which is unchanged from August 1; records and run differentials in this table are through July 31, the data the panel actually saw. The Gap column now compares the blend against the live August 6 price.

Club	Record (Run Diff, thru 7/31)	Kalshi Aug 1	Kalshi Aug 6	AI Blend (after revision)	Gap now
New York Yankees	62-48 (+89)	23.5¢	22.5¢	23.2%	+1
Tampa Bay Rays	64-45 (+38)	16.5¢	18¢	18.3%	0
Chicago White Sox	58-51 (+48)	8.5¢	8.5¢	14.1%	+6
Boston Red Sox	58-51 (+55)	10.5¢	20¢	12.6%	-7*
Texas Rangers	55-55 (-31)	9.5¢	3.5¢	5.5%	+2
Detroit Tigers	52-58 (+50)	2.5¢	2.5¢	5.4%	+3*
Houston Astros	56-55 (-32)	8.5¢	8.5¢	4.9%	-4
Minnesota Twins	56-55 (-27)	2.5¢	1.5¢	4.9%	+3
Seattle Mariners	53-58 (+1)	10.5¢	8.5¢	4.9%	-4
Cleveland Guardians	56-55 (-17)	4.5¢	4.5¢	3.9%	-1
Baltimore Orioles	54-56 (-22)	2.5¢	1¢	1.4%	0
Toronto Blue Jays	51-59 (-58)	1¢	0.5¢	0.6%	0
Kansas City Royals	46-65 (-96)	1¢	0.5¢	0.2%	0
Athletics	45-65 (-141)	1¢	0.5¢	0.1%	0
Los Angeles Angels	42-68 (-75)	1¢	0.5¢	0.1%	0

These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. The Blend column is the mean of the eight models' revised numbers, generated August 1; the Gap column is blend percentage minus the live market cents, a directional read rather than a precise edge. The two starred rows carry post-verdict news the blend has not seen: Boston's gap reflects the Rutschman trade and the streak (see above), and Detroit's reflects the Skubal and Mize sales (see below). The 15 live mids sum to about 101 cents, so this board trades remarkably close to a clean 100-cent partition.

Every Seat's Round-1 Number

The per-model split before the revision round. On a phone this table scrolls sideways; the board above carries the headline numbers, which average all eight seats' revised estimates.

Club	ChatGPT (GPT-5.5)	Claude Fable	Claude Opus	Claude Sonnet	Gemini 3.1 Pro	GLM 5.2	Kimi K3	DeepSeek V4
New York Yankees	23.0	23.2	22.1	17.7	24.8	23.0	26.0	22.9
Tampa Bay Rays	17.0	19.1	16.1	15.7	22.2	17.0	19.5	19.9
Chicago White Sox	10.5	16.1	11.6	9.6	16.5	10.0	14.5	14.0
Boston Red Sox	11.5	14.1	12.0	13.2	11.0	14.0	12.5	10.0
Texas Rangers	6.8	5.0	5.5	5.1	6.0	8.0	4.5	5.0
Detroit Tigers	7.5	3.0	8.0	8.1	2.5	4.0	2.5	4.0
Houston Astros	5.0	5.5	6.5	7.6	5.5	7.0	4.5	5.0
Minnesota Twins	7.0	3.5	5.2	6.6	5.0	6.0	5.2	4.0
Seattle Mariners	3.5	4.5	5.2	5.6	1.8	3.0	5.5	8.0
Cleveland Guardians	4.0	3.0	5.0	6.6	3.5	5.0	3.6	4.0
Baltimore Orioles	1.8	1.5	1.4	2.5	0.7	2.5	0.9	2.0
Toronto Blue Jays	1.5	0.8	1.1	1.2	0.2	0.3	0.5	1.0
Kansas City Royals	0.4	0.2	0.1	0.3	0.1	0.1	0.1	0.1
Athletics	0.3	0.1	0.0	0.1	0.1	0.1	0.1	0.1
Los Angeles Angels	0.2	0.1	0.0	0.2	0.1	0.1	0.1	0.1

Model estimates generated August 1, 2026, price-blind from live fetched data. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial or trading advice. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange; 18+, availability varies by state.

The Revision Round

After round 1, each model read the other seven's anonymized reasoning and could revise with a stated reason. Per-club disagreement fell from 1.2 points to 0.59, and the biggest moves all chased the same two arguments:

"The Central champion is the odds-on #2 seed and bye recipient, which roughly doubles per-path equity versus the wild-card route." (Claude Opus, raising the White Sox from 11.6% to 13.5%)

"I had underweighted how actionable that regression is in 50 games." (DeepSeek V4, raising Detroit from 4% to 7.5% on the +50 run differential)

Not everyone chased. Kimi stayed the panel's high seat on the Yankees, trimming only from 26.0 to 25.0, and said why:

"Held the Yankees at 25.0 despite being the panel's max — every forecaster's own case concedes the best true talent and a near-locked berth, and ~45% bye equity supports the number." (Kimi K3)

New York Yankees: The Favorite Both Sides Still Agree On

The market says 22.5 cents; the blend says 23.2%; every seat put New York first, and five days of deadline chaos moved the price a single cent. The case is the same everywhere you look on the panel:

"Their +89 run differential is the best in the league by a wide margin and implies a true-talent level several games better than their 62-48 record, which is exactly the profile that wins short series in October." (Claude Fable)

That differential still leads the AL, at +81 through August 5, and New York still holds a seven-game cushion on the wild-card cut line. What has changed is the shape of the race around them: the division deficit to Tampa Bay has stretched to 4.5 games, and the club directly below them in the East just added Adley Rutschman. One honest wrinkle in the bye math: Kimi's ~45% bye equity was priced with New York 2.5 back of Tampa Bay, and at 4.5 back it is meaningfully lower, which trims the strongest single support under the panel's 23.2% even as blend and price still land within a point of each other. Eric Lindquist's ask heading into the window was which moves could push the Yankees' number up or down; the ledger's answer was Ramos and García in, Doval out, and the market read it the way markets read role-player shopping, with a one-cent shrug. When a price and a price-blind panel still land within a point of each other after a week like this one, the number is probably about right.

Tampa Bay Rays: Best Record, Bigger Arsenal, Second Billing

The Rays own the AL's best record, now 68-46, and they spent the deadline acting like a team that intends to keep it, adding Freddy Peralta for the stretch run. The market moved them from 16.5 to 18 cents, which happens to land almost exactly on the panel's 18.3% blend. What kept every seat from going higher in the first place is unchanged:

"Tampa Bay's 64-45 is the AL's best record but only +38 supports it — a nine-ish-game Pythagorean overperformance that typically regresses." (Claude Opus)

The differential has since improved to +41, which is progress but not a rebuttal: 68-46 on +41 is still the overperformance profile Opus flagged, while the Yankees' worse record sits on a differential twice as strong. That inversion, record versus engine, is the whole reason the AL's best record is the market's third choice at 18 cents. Peralta fits the same honest frame; at 5.37 on the season he is October depth with front-line memory, not a co-ace, which is why the add moved the price a cent and a half instead of rewriting the tier. The read stands: a team very likely to be playing in October, with a seeding edge worth real equity, whose short-series ceiling sits a notch below New York's.

Chicago White Sox: The Contender The Models Want, Now With Receipts

Here is the board's standing edge, and the deadline only sharpened it: market 8.5 cents, blend 14.1%, a gap of nearly six points that has not closed a cent. The structural argument the revision round converged on was the bye path, with the Central winner the likely No. 2 seed, and Kimi calling the bye "worth more than even the group's high marks" after re-running the seeding math. What is new is that Chicago's front office spent the window building the October roster that argument assumes: Luis Castillo in the rotation, Brazobán in leverage innings, Joey Bart behind the plate, Brenton Doyle in center. Eric flagged the Brazobán add the night it broke, a day after the front office had already landed Castillo. The honest counterweight: the Sox have played .500 ball in their last ten and the division lead over Cleveland is three games, so the on-field club has drifted while the roster improved (59-54, +39 through August 5). None of the models' case rested on the last ten games, though. It is about a division leader with a validating run differential and the league's clearest path to skipping a coin-flip round, priced dead level with the team it just bought its rotation headliner from, and two cents below where that team was trading a week ago. The same timestamp caution that applies to Boston applies here, since the 14.1% also predates the window's final 48 hours; the difference is the direction of the news since, which on Chicago's side of the ledger was all additions.

Boston Red Sox: The Reprice The Panel Never Saw

On August 1 this was a quiet row: 10.5 cents, 12.6% blend, a mild panel lean on the AL's second-best run differential. Then Boston ran its winning streak to seven, went 9-1 over its last ten, pushed the differential to +76, and traded for Adley Rutschman, who arrived on the 10-day injured list with left wrist inflammation, making the new price partly a bet on his return timeline. The market's response was the biggest move on the board, 10.5 to 20 cents, and it turned Boston into the market's second choice ahead of Tampa Bay. Be careful reading the board table here: the panel's 12.6% is not a fade of any of that, it is a number generated before all of it. This is the one row where the market is working with a materially newer fact set than the models, and the gap says more about the timestamp than the team. Eric's ask had "the Red Sox getting hot" in it while the trade window was still open; the market now agrees, at nearly double the price it was asking five days ago. Whether 20 cents is the right price for a wild-card-track team, however hot, is exactly the kind of question the next verdict cycle exists to answer.

Seattle Mariners: The Fade The Market Started Agreeing With

The panel's loudest disagreement at the verdict was Seattle: 10.5 cents for a 53-58 club, blended at 4.9%, less than half the market's number. Five days later the market has come two cents toward the models, and the deadline is a big reason why: Seattle sent Luis Castillo, its rotation headliner, to Chicago, the kind of move a front office makes when it is pricing its own October the way the panel did. The Taylor Ward add puts a real bat in the lineup, but a club does not sell its best starter while it believes in this October. Kimi spoke for the fade at the verdict and the line has aged well:

"+1 differential at 53-58 doesn't earn an October-rotation premium." (Kimi K3)

There is also a fetched history that likely explains the market's lingering affection: Seattle took the 2025 pennant race to a Game 7, losing the ALCS 4-3 to Toronto. At 8.5 cents against a 4.9% blend, the panel would tell you the reprice is directionally right and unfinished.

Where The Panel Splits From The Money

Houston Astros: market 8.5¢, blend 4.9%. The gap the deadline did not touch. What the models saw was a division leader whose -32 differential and seller's deadline (McCullers, Pearson out) do not look like a pennant winner's, and the price has not moved a cent since:

"Its -32 run differential is badly out of step with a first-place record, and the front office signaled a lack of conviction by trading away two rotation pieces (McCullers Jr., Colton Gordon) rather than buying." (Claude Sonnet)

Honesty requires the other side: Houston has gone 7-3 in its last ten and still leads the West at 59-57. The panel's fade is about the underlying club, not the standings line, and the next few weeks decide which one is lying.

Texas Rangers: market 3.5¢, blend 5.5%. At the verdict this was a four-point panel fade of a 9.5-cent price. The market has since done all the work and then some, cutting Texas to 3.5 cents as the club slipped under .500 and quietly moved depth infielder Josh Smith to Toronto days after buying. The fade converged; at the new price the panel's number is actually a shade above the market's.

Minnesota Twins: market 1.5¢, blend 4.9%. The quiet overlay got quieter. The panel liked the Minter and Kremer adds; the team has since lost four straight and slid to 56-59, and the market cut the price rather than wait. The blend predates the slide, so read this gap with the same timestamp caution as Boston's, in the other direction. What would make 1.5 cents interesting again is concrete: a winning week with the two new arms in the rotation while Cleveland, a game ahead of them and 3-7 in its last ten, keeps sliding.

The Trap On The Board: Detroit Tigers

At the verdict, Detroit was the panel's most contested row: 2.5 cents against a 5.4% blend, a +50 run differential screaming sequencing luck, and DeepSeek nearly doubling its number on exactly that. Opus, which opened at 8%, cut to 4.8% after doing the conditional math in public:

"At 3.5 games back with 50 to play their playoff probability is roughly 25-30%, and even a generous ~15% conditional pennant rate for a wild-card entrant caps them near 4-5%." (Claude Opus)

The deadline then rewrote the premise under both arguments: Detroit traded Tarik Skubal to the Dodgers and Casey Mize to San Diego inside 24 hours. The differential is somehow still elite (+69 through August 5, on a 55-59 record), and Detroit still sits only 1.5 games back of a wild card. But a front office that sells its two best starters in the middle of that race has told you its own conditional math out loud. The panel's 5.4% was generated before those trades and would not survive them intact; the market's 2.5 cents, which never moved, now looks less like the mispricing and more like the market having read the room early. One caution for the whole bottom of the board still applies: the half-cent longshots sit near the exchange's minimum tick, so their "edge" against a 0.1% blend is partly just a price that cannot go lower.

Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss

One standing rule for the bottom of this board: a half-cent price cannot go lower, so a longshot is only interesting if you can name the specific September that makes it tradeable.

• Detroit Tigers (2.5¢, Blend 5.4%): covered above; the run differential keeps the argument alive, the Skubal and Mize sales gutted it. The board's most interesting row, no longer its best edge; the thing to watch is whether the differential holds through an August without its two best arms.
• Cleveland Guardians (4.5¢, Blend 3.9%): the deadline's quiet AL Central buyer, adding Nathaniel Lowe and Jo Adell, but 57-58 with a -21 differential and three games behind Chicago. The panel sees a coin-flip berth with a low ceiling, and the price agrees.
• Toronto Blue Jays (0.5¢, Blend 0.6%): the defending AL champion retooled rather than folded, flipping Kevin Gausman for a package while adding Jameson Taillon and José Soriano. At 54-61 the panel's verdict-day read still fits; Fable was blunt: "defending pennant or not, 51-59 with a -58 differential and a 4.5-game wild-card deficit is a dead roster."

How To Read These Prices

This board is unusually friendly to read because it is a complete partition: some AL club must win the pennant, and all 15 are listed.

A Worked Example: What 22.5 Cents Actually Says

The 15 live mids sum to about 101 cents, close enough to 100 that the raw prices nearly are probabilities. Re-scaled for that small overround, the Yankees' 22.5 cents implies roughly 22.3%, so the panel's 23.2% is agreement, not an edge. Do the same arithmetic where the gap is real and current: Chicago's 8.5 cents re-scales to about 8.4% against a 14.1% blend, the one large disagreement on this board that post-verdict news has strengthened rather than stale-dated. Seattle's 8.5 cents against 4.9% is the same disagreement with about a third of the gap already closed. And Boston's 20 cents against a 12.6% blend is the row where the arithmetic misleads, because the blend predates the news the price is made of.

A few honest points before acting on any number above:

• Eligibility. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, not a sportsbook. You must be 18 or older and located in an eligible state, and availability varies by state and can change.
• Liquidity. 4.2 million contracts is real volume for an exchange futures board, but the bottom of this book is functionally one-sided: the four half-cent longshots are quoted at no bid against a 1-cent ask, so there is no exit at your number once you own them. And these contracts have six to twelve weeks of injuries, call-ups, and collapses left to trade through before the ALCS settles them; as the last five days showed, the repricing never stops.
• Shopping The Number. The same October outcomes are priced at sportsbooks as futures; the live odds screen does the venue-comparison work of putting every book's MLB number side by side, our free expert picks today cover the daily slate, and the exchange price above is the benchmark to shop against.
• Not Advice. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.

The Bottom Line

The market and the panel still agree on the headline: this is the Yankees' pennant to lose, at about one-in-4.5 either way you price it, and a deadline in which they did nearly nothing moved their number one cent. The week's real information is everything that happened below them. The catcher Eric Lindquist flagged in Yankees trade talks became the reason Boston doubled instead; Texas and Seattle sold their way toward the panel's numbers; Detroit sold its way out of the panel's argument. And through all of it, the White Sox gap the models flagged as the board's biggest edge sits exactly where it was, at 8.5 cents, now attached to the deadline's most aggressive buy-side roster. The AL winner meets the National League's in a market we have already scored on the World Series 2026 board, and the individual-award side of this same league lives on the AL MVP model verdict. Every number above gets graded against the settled contracts in a retrospective on this page once the pennant is decided.

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Verdicts generated August 1, 2026, price-blind; live prices as of August 6, 2026, 13:00 UTC; deadline transactions and standings through August 5 from the fetched MLB transactions ledger. Trade-deadline analysis with Eric Lindquist. Panel: ChatGPT, Claude Fable, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GLM 5.2, Kimi K3, and DeepSeek V4, revised in an anonymized cross-read; the blend is the simple mean of the eight revised numbers. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.