2025 MLB · a teamwork data story
Every 2025 season begins as a single number — wins above replacement — and ends as a clubhouse full of players. This is the trip from one to the other, in three charts.
The thirty teams, by record. Click one to follow it through every chart.
Primer
Before the next chart turns each team into a single number, here is where that number comes from. WAR — wins above replacement — is built one player at a time, by adding up the runs a player creates or saves and dividing by runs-per-win. Hover any bar or distribution to read it.
Chapter one
Wins above replacement is denominated in wins, so plotting each team's total WAR against its actual win count should trace a nearly straight line — and it does, at r = 0.94. That near-tautology is the starting point, not the discovery.
The story is in the gaps off the line. The fit buys about 0.9 wins per unit of WAR above a replacement floor near 52 wins; the teams sitting above it banked more games than their talent bought, the ones below left wins on the table. The colored quadrants name the four ways a season goes — elite engines, efficiency darlings, undercashing talent, organizational drift.
A team's WAR is only the sum of its players'. So before asking how a club assembled its wins, look at the raw material: every player in the league, sized by what he was worth.
Chapter two
Chapter one was teams as single dots. Now every regular in the league becomes a face, dropped onto the column for the role he plays and stacked by the WAR he earned. Batters in one lane, pitchers in another, the rare two-way player straddling both.
Seen this way the season stops being thirty clubs and becomes a few hundred people, most of them bunched near replacement level with a thin spire of stars climbing far above. Filter by position, or pull up a single team to see where its players land in that crowd.
The crowd has a shape, but it is still everyone at once. The last chapter takes these same players and sorts them back onto the teams they actually won games for.
Primer
The last chapter measures players a second way: not the talent they had, but the win probability they actually swung, play by play. Here is how that running total is built before you read it on a team.
Chapter three
Pick a team and the season unspools player by player: every contributor as a tug-of-war bar of win probability added in wins and spent in losses, over a sortable table. Some clubs stack a few enormous bars; others win with a long, even row of mid-sized ones.
That contrast — concentration versus depth — is the same thin tail from the last chapter, now seen one franchise at a time. A top-heavy roster is one injury from collapse; a balanced one has more ways to lose, and more ways to cover.
Three views of one season — the talent a team had, the players that talent was made of, and the way each club turned it into wins.