How many stars does it take to build a playoff team?

Let’s examine two seemingly contrasting truths:

The Detroit Tigers are having an excellent year. One of the best in the majors.

The Detroit Tigers are having a terrible year. One of the worst in the majors.

Can those ideas really be true at the same time? How?

You’ve likely heard that Dillon Dingler and Kevin McGonigle are both in the top-10 of fWAR for 2026. They’re the only teammates at the top, at least among position players. fWAR isn’t everything, but it’s an excellent broad strokes tool, and it matches the eye test with these two. They’re having truly phenomenal seasons so far. The top of Detroit’s lineup has arguably never been in better hands.

And yet, the Tigers are 4th in the AL Central. They’re 5 games back of the third Wild Card spot and a brutal 3-game play-in to the real playoffs. Despite an AL-best 12-7 record in June, the Tigers have only a .430 winning percentage on the season. Things look extremely dire. If they don’t turn this around quickly, they risk losing Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize to trades and wasting a year with potentially 5 top-50 players on their roster, once you remember Riley Greene is still really good at hitting baseballs.

But all this talk had me curious: how bad are things, really, from a historical standpoint? The headliner stat here is a pair of teammates in the top-10 for fWAR, so how often do teams like this not make the playoffs?

To answer this, I did the normal thing and scrolled through the yearly FanGraphs leaderboard for every year dating back to 2012, the first year with 2 Wild Card teams, and made note of which teams had two hitters in the top-10 for fWAR. Here’s the results, in table form, of that research.

Besides a trip down memory lane – Carlos Gomez was how good? – one obvious detail stands out to me here. A lot of those teams were bad. A lot more than expected, anyways.

There were 18 total duos going back to 2012, including the Tigers. 11 of them finished above .500, and 12 made the playoffs, which sounds like good odds until you consider the unexpected flipside of those statements. 33% of those teams didn’t made the playoffs. 39% didn’t even have a winning record! When I started this, I fully expected something closer to 80% making the playoffs, even in a sport where winning is as team-dependent as baseball. Sure roster depth is important, and you need lineup depth and a good bullpen, etc. Still, if you have two monsters and can’t put the rest together, something has gone badly amiss.

One other small note: the 2021 Washington Nationals get an asterisk, because they traded Trea Turner at the deadline. As far as I could tell, he was the only player on this list to change hands midseason. That probably explains why they have the worst record of any on this list.

Does this mean anything for 2026? Not all that much, honestly; there isn’t much predictive value in this data on its own. There’s a lot of context needed to organize all this. All we learned is it’s hard, but not impossible, to miss the playoffs with two elite hitters. If the Tigers want to avoid this slightly less ignominious than expected fate, they’ll need their supporting cast to step up. History shows the stars are never enough on their own.