Go ahead, think about the Los Angeles Angels, and imagine how you would explain the team in a sentence or two. Yet, for the Angels, even a sentence could be too long. You could default to two words: Mike Trout.
Trout has been the best player on the team nearly from the moment he arrived, because he has been the best player in baseball in that same time. It's not that the Angels don't have anyone else; it's that since Trout's first full season in 2012, the impression has been the Angels haven't had enough talent to support him. The Angels have felt like a one-man ballclub.
That's not an unfair conclusion, because the distribution of the Angels' production has been lopsided in the Trout era. This year, though, the Angels aren't alone. Some other teams are similarly dependent on one player to shoulder most of the load.
I'll use wins above replacement (WAR), because it's a number that's easy to understand. There's team WAR and there's player WAR, and using the numbers at FanGraphs, I calculated everyone's team WAR, and then I calculated how much of that is from each team's best player.
Here is the result of that math:
Percent of team WAR from best player, 2017
The median is 19 percent. The mean is 22 percent. The average team has gotten about one-fifth of its WAR from its best player. The numbers confirm our feelings about the Angels, who are over toward the left at 36 percent. Nearly two-fifths of their WAR has come from Trout. You also have the Padres in front of them, thanks to the surprising Trevor Cahill. And in first are the Braves, who can thank the currently injured Freddie Freeman for 43 percent of their total value. Before getting hurt, Freeman was hitting like an MVP, which is good. But that hurt part -- not so good. Based on how much value Freeman brought to the team, the injury is very bad.
I mentioned the "surprising Padres" because they don't project as one of those teams that would end up on the left side of the plot. But this comes down to being a function of the math. The Padres just don't generate very much WAR as a team, so it doesn't take a very high WAR to end up responsible for a big chunk of it.
In 2003, Dmitri Young was responsible for 112 percent of the Tigers' WAR, because he was worth 1.9 wins, while the rest of the roster was worth minus-0.2 combined.
In 2013, Jason Castro was responsible for 147 percent of the Astros' WAR because of the same phenomenon. The worse a team gets, the weirder things get.
I decided to narrow the historical window to teams that finished at least .500, from between 2002 and 2016. These are teams that remained relevant, and I went back to 2002 because that's the earliest limit of our more credible WAR metric. It's a sample of 237 team-seasons, and the most lopsided rosters show up at 31 percent: Carlos Beltran was worth 31 percent of the 2003 Royals' WAR, Jose Bautista was worth 31 percent of the 2011 Blue Jays' WAR, and Trout was worth 31 percent of the 2015 Angels' WAR.
Now, let's return to 2017. The Angels are around .500, with Trout at 36 percent. The Pirates are kind of around .500, with Ivan Nova at 32 percent. The Twins are above .500, with Miguel Sano at 31 percent. You could make the argument that these teams are one-player-production-heavy even while hanging around .500. I'm not sure whether these squads will stay that way, but with the Angels, at least, we have an inkling that it will.
Then, there's another thing to do. The analysis above examined how much of a team's WAR comes from one player. Yet that analysis says next to nothing about the separation between a team's best player and its second-best. Let's round out the picture.
WAR gap between best and second-best player, 2017
Hey, look, it's the Angels! At this writing, there's a 2.1-win difference between Trout and Andrelton Simmons. Simmons is a pretty good shortstop, all things considered, but he does most of his best work with his glove and not his bat. As a team, the Angels are 14th in WAR. If you compare every roster, and after subtracting each team's best player, then the Angels drop to 19th. Instead of being right behind the Rockies, they end up right behind the Mariners.
Following the Angels, we find the Twins again. There's presently a 1.6-win difference between Sano and Robbie Grossman. Something tells me most of you wouldn't have assumed Grossman has been the Twins' No. 2 player. Something tells me most of you wouldn't have assumed Grossman has been on the Twins in the first place. They go from 15th in overall team WAR to 20th after subtracting the top players. The Twins have been a lot like the Angels, and Sano's hitting so far has been positively Trout-ian.
After the Twins, there are the Braves. There's a 1.4-win difference between Freeman and Matt Kemp. Once again, I'll remind you, Freeman is injured and he'll be out for a while, and Matt Adams is no Freddie Freeman.
To round out the top four, we've got the Red Sox, for which there's a 1.2-win difference between Chris Sale and Mookie Betts. Unlike the other teams, I wouldn't yet suggest the Red Sox have a true depth problem, but Sale has been extraordinary. For the Red Sox, this could be interpreted as more of a good thing than bad.
The opposite of a lopsided team might be the Astros. There has been no real difference between their top two players -- Jose Altuve (1.3 WAR) and Carlos Correa (1.2 WAR) -- and they also have the smallest WAR share coming from the top player. There was a sense before the season the Astros would thrive because of their balance, and through the first month and a half, their balance is evident.
The Astros' balance has translated to an MLB-best 31 wins through Tuesday's games, whereas the top-heavy clubs include the Angels, the Braves and the Twins. Two of those teams -- the Twins, who lead the AL Central at 25-18, and the Angels, who are 25-24 -- hope to stay relevant, while the Braves merely hope to stay afloat. It's easy to see how the Freeman injury is devastating, and a Trout or Sano injury would be similarly destructive to their respective teams. But as long as that doesn't happen, the Twins and Angels could be powered by their singular stars. And in the Twins' case, Sano could now be supported by the recently recalled Jose Berrios, to say nothing of Byron Buxton's potential to become a star at any moment. The Twins might not have to lean on Sano so heavily for the remainder of the season, which would be fantastic for their competitive chances.
No team wants to lean too much on one player. Doing so makes it challenging to win. As a few teams have demonstrated, it's not an impossibility. This is another way Trout and the Angels hope to be exceptional. The Twins, for their part, hope for better balance. Seeing as Sano isn't quite on Trout's level, they're likely to need that balance to remain in the hunt.