There is an intermittently popular theory about how baseball teams win that goes something like this: A team that features a franchise offensive player is less likely to win than one featuring a broad variety of competent ones, both because the former team will have a disproportionate amount of its payroll tied up in one star, leaving less money for the supporting cast, and because it will also come to rely too heavily on that player, leading to a lack of solid, fundamental offensive play.

The consistent failure of the Texas Rangers when they featured Alex Rodriguez as their centerpiece is commonly cited as proof of this theory, as is the success of the 2001 Seattle Mariners, who won a record 116 games after letting go of Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr.

Looking at the pennant winners this year, one might be tempted not only to think the theory is correct, but to corral the White Sox and Astros alongside those Rangers and Mariners teams, as well. Both temptations should be resisted.

To define a term here, I’ll consider any player with a park-and-league-adjusted OPS of at least 40% above league average – a figure that would put a player in or near the top 10 in either league most years – to be a franchise offensive player, a star around whom a team can construct its lineup. During the last five years, eight of 40 playoff teams have lacked such a player: the 2002-04 Twins, the 2002-03 Athletics, the 2002 Diamondbacks and Angels (a team that featured three hitters with an adjusted OPS above 130), and this year’s White Sox. Every other playoff team featured at least one such hitter; many featured several. (The 2001 Mariners, incidentally, featured two – Bret Boone and Edgar Martinez.)

It’s not news that good teams feature great hitters. Even this year’s Astros, who deserve their reputation as an offensively impotent club bailed out by one of the great pitching troikas

of all time, feature Lance Berkman, a stud hitter whose reputation doesn’t match his numbers. (Did you know his on-base average has been above .400 in each of the last five seasons?) But even to a skeptic of the “depth equals winning” theory like me, it’s surprising that in recent years only one in five playoff teams haven’t featured a true hitting star.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be. The playoff teams that didn’t feature at least one overwhelming threat in the middle of the lineup have several things in common: excellent pitching staffs, fine defenses, exceptional managers, and a broad array of offensive players who are useful or better. These teams have everything save a superstar hitter.

It’s rare that a team has everything going for it. What a great hitter like Berkman or a 2004 Adrian Beltre affords is a margin of error. If the second baseman can’t hit, it doesn’t kill the lineup; the team can afford a few blowups from the middle reliever over the course of a season, because it’s not always going to be scratching for just enough runs to win; and even an idiot manager can afford to do something less than the ideal job when he has Barry Bonds on his side.

Notably, the team many claim is the ultimate demonstration of the “lots of good players, no great ones” approach to teambuilding, the 1998 Yankees, had Bernie Williams batting cleanup. His adjusted OPS, at 59% better than league average, would have ranked behind only Travis Hafner, Alex Rodriguez, and David Ortiz this year. That team was, in essence, the best possible version of this year’s White Sox, with the added benefit of a center fielder hitting like an MVP.

The lesson here for baseball executives should be that there are no easy lessons to be taken from successful teams. It’s easy to look at the White Sox, note that they don’t feature a Pujols, an Ortiz, or anyone near that caliber, and conclude that scrappiness and hustle are sufficient for success. I expect teams to do so, as they have an obvious motivation for wanting to think that expensive players are actually an obstacle to winning.

But for a team to have a realistic expectation of making the playoffs, it either needs a broadly excellent team featuring the kind of star offensive talent that can make up for deficiencies elsewhere, or it needs an otherwise decent team with a pitching staff of the caliber of recent Twins and Athletics teams.

There aren’t any easy solutions in baseball, which is what the theory with which we started amounts to: a cheap bit of wanting something for nothing, a hope that “playing the game 132 1844 256 1855the right way” is the equal of game-breaking talent. It would be wonderful if it were so, and all the teams full of players who play hard and clean made the playoffs every year without being burdened by rich, egotistical stars. It isn’t so.

tmarchman@nysun.com