Over at FanGraphs last week, Jeff Sullivan wrote about the different makeups of teams around baseball. The Cardinals have a lot of players in the middle of successful seasons, but they don’t have anyone threatening to win the MVP. The Angels have Mike Trout, who is somehow getting better, but they don’t have a lot of support behind him.
To do this, Sullivan looked at three categories:
- The five best players on every team, by WAR
- The next five best players, by WAR
- The rest of the players after those top 10
The results were helpful when it came to explaining the relative successes and failures of some teams.