Don’t Forget About These Good Baseball Players On (Possibly) Bad Baseball Teams
Stars can’t always save a team, but they can still make it worth watching.
One of the fascinating things about baseball — relative to other sports — is how often great individual seasons happen on bad teams. In the NBA, where a single star can be worth 10, 15, or even 20 wins above replacement, just a few elite players can drag a team toward competence. But in MLB, even historic performances don’t guarantee success — as we repeatedly saw from the Mike Trout/Shohei Ohtani-era Angels (among many other teams over the years).
That dynamic makes it easy to overlook standout performances on struggling teams. So I thought it might be interesting to look at FanGraphs’ projected Wins Above Replacement (WAR) leaders for the upcoming 2025 season and compare them with their teams’ projected W-L records—highlighting the top talents whose contributions might still not be enough to lift the ballclub to respectability:
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