Christian Yelich was a deserving MVP candidate for the Brewers in 2018, but even he couldn't get Milwaukee to the playoffs single-handedly. Without Wade Miley's shocking 2018, featuring a 2.57 ERA over 16 starts, Milwaukee doesn't even get to the playoffs, let alone get within a game of the World Series.
That's baseball for you, where you can't just ride your stars to the championship. Imagine the New England Patriots if Tom Brady participated in only 15 percent of the plays or the Golden State Warriors if Stephen Curry could take only a few more shots than Draymond Green every season.
The teams that make the playoffs in baseball invariably will need to get some surprising performances from their non-stars as well as their top players. Looking at the very early races, I picked some of my favorite "lesser" players who are in the right position to push their teams into fall baseball if they reach their 2019 upside.
It pains me to think of Sano as a "lesser" player. After all, he seemed to be on a trajectory that would lead him to be a star by now. Instead, he has yet to put up a 30-homer season, and 2018 was a parade of disasters. After an April with only two multihit games, Sano missed a month with a hamstring injury and was demoted to Triple-A Rochester in June with a brutal .675 OPS. Sano's .684 OPS after returning barely nudged his seasonal numbers before a knee injury from a slide ended his season in early September.
But the Twins need Sano to finally have that one, crazy breakout season more than ever. The team's 95 OPS+ was 10th in the American League in 2018, and the team no longer has Eduardo Escobar to play third in Sano's absence; in September, the team had to resort to using Ehire Adrianza and Gregorio Petit. Nelson Cruz can provide some of the power lost with the departures of Escobar and Brian Dozier, but the Twins need to be better offensively than last year, not just repeat 2018's disappointing level.
Shane Bieber
Cleveland Indians
If you were wondering why Cleveland was listening to offers for Corey Kluber, it's because as much as the team likes Kluber, the starting rotation is very deep, while the outfield is very ... not. Mike Clevinger appears to have already had his breakout season, but Bieber put up a 3.23 FIP in his rookie season and actually managed to increase his strikeout rate upon reaching the majors. Cleveland's offense was solid overall in 2018, but it was largely due to the two guys on the left side of the infield, Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez, putting up MVP-type numbers. The Indians can't expect that every year, and with the outfield likely much worse than 2018, they'll need even more out of the pitching. Bieber being the latest Indians pitcher to take that next step could either make the rotation solid from top to bottom or perhaps lead Cleveland to revisit a Kluber or Trevor Bauer trade if it can bring back a significant outfield bat.
The Braves won the National League East in 2018, but the rest of the division -- well, except for the Marlins -- looks dangerous. Donaldson has been an afterthought the past couple of seasons, missing significant time because of injury and showing a marked decline in performance when healthy in 2018. But the Braves did manage something that's hard to do, acquiring someone with a plausible shot at an MVP run on a one-year contract. Donaldson might not be the player he was even two years ago, but if he does make a comeback in a big way, that could very well be enough to put Atlanta over the top.
If 2018 is any indication, it looks like the Yankees are going to have to win a lot of games to take the AL East in 2019. So naturally one looks to a team's largest holes as the place for potential improvement, and for the Yankees, that position is first base. This is nothing new. Since 2012, the team's first basemen have combined for at least an .800 OPS only once, back in 2015, Mark Teixeira's last All-Star season.
Greg Bird hasn't become that savior, due to a combination of injuries and underperformance. Can Voit finally stabilize things? Coming into last year, ZiPS projected Voit as a .760 OPS hitter for the Cardinals (in Yankee Stadium, that projection would have been a .779 OPS). Voit did his best to show that his improvement in the minors in 2017 was no fluke, hitting .299/.391/.500 for Memphis before absolutely raking in New York (.333/.405/.689 and 14 homers in 39 games). No, Voit isn't going to put up an OPS over 1.000 in 2019, but it'd be dangerous to consider him Kevin Maas: The Next Generation. If Voit can shore up the Yankees' weakest spot, it would go a long way to ending the team's six-year division-crown drought.
A starting pitcher
San Diego Padres
With the addition of Manny Machado, the still league-average Ian Kinsler and full seasons of Franmil Reyes and Luis Urias (not to mention the eventual promotion of Fernando Tatis Jr.), the Padres' offense looks a lot closer to playoff-quality than it has in a very long time. Plus, Eric Hosmer's odd-year trend!
What the team is still missing is the starting pitching to match. The Padres have no starter, outside of Joey Lucchesi, who looks highly probable to be good in 2019. But the thing is, the Padres have the deepest stable of young pitching in the majors, even more than the Braves. With so much talent, you have to think that one or two of the youngsters will break out in 2019, whether it's Chris Paddack or Logan Allen or Jacob Nix or Eric Lauer or Cal Quantrill. And that's before even considering the very real possibility that someone at a lower level, such as MacKenzie Gore or Adrian Morejon, will blow up and tear through the minors quickly. It's hard to say who, but getting 2-4 additional wins the team is not expecting would make the Padres very wild-card relevant.
Don't laugh (I admit I did). Desmond has been a nearly unmitigated disaster for the Rockies, the team overspending on a player who was never going to have value as a first baseman. Desmond couldn't be traded now even if the Rockies offered to eat 80 percent of his salary.
But in moving Desmond to center field, the Rockies might be stumbling into a scenario in which he could theoretically offer value to Colorado. Desmond doesn't hit like a corner outfielder or first baseman, but he might hit enough to be a reasonable center fielder. The big question is his defense, which wasn't good in his sole prior season in center (2016 with Texas). But he was learning the position cold back then and remains a reasonably athletic player. Besides, Charlie Blackmon was downright hideous in center for the Rockies in 2018. Desmond theoretically being able to play center already has brought value to the Rockies in the sense that it enabled them to sign Daniel Murphy, who might actually be a decent first baseman for the team.
Felix Hernandez
Seattle Mariners
It's a bit sad to see how far the King has fallen in recent years. Perhaps I'm being excessively romantic -- ZiPS thinks I am -- but even with the loss of velocity, King Felix had periods of effectiveness in 2015 and 2016 before the bottom really fell out in his career. If he can stay healthy, a part of me just feels as if he can moxie his way into adequacy for a season or two. CC Sabathia's 2013-2015 performance was no less bleak than Hernandez's the past few seasons, and Sabathia came back to stabilize the back of the Yankees' rotation for three years now.
The Mariners aren't as bad as people think and there's still enough talent on the team, especially if we see a similar revival from the still-not-old Kyle Seager, that Hernandez could make Seattle surprisingly competitive. After all, the American League is very bifurcated now, with four teams clearly a step ahead of the rest of the league and a lot of teams still early in their rebuilds. With a very small middle class in the AL, the Mariners could, in the sunnier scenarios, be in the wild-card race, something that probably would not be true if they were in the NL.
The Mets seem very determined to give Jason Vargas every chance to remain in the rotation in 2018. Short of a Dallas Keuchel signing that isn't likely to happen, there are limited in-house candidates to push the Mets to change course. Seth Lugo is the first name that would pop out, but with a career 2.38 ERA as a reliever, the Mets have a good argument to let discretion be the better part of valor and keep him in a role in which he's excelled.
With Franklyn Kilome having Tommy John surgery and the higher-upside Mets pitching prospects farther away, that leaves Lockett, a big righty with a sinker that hit 94-95 but who struggles against lefties (an OPS platoon split of nearly 300 points in the majors and minors in 2018). He's interesting, though, and it's not as if Vargas was impressing anyone; ZiPS doesn't give Lockett much of an upside, but actually projects an ERA of a half-run better than Vargas in 2019.