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Why Giants won’t hold on in NL West

By DEREK CARTY Derek Carty writes about baseball analytics for VSiN.com. VSiN programming can be heard on iHeartRadio platforms.

If you had polled a hundred baseball analysts back in March, I’d be surprised if you found a single one who would have picked the Giants to win the NL West outright. And yet here we are, nearly into August, and the Giants sit not only atop the division, they lead MLB with a .626 winning percentage. They entered Monday two games up on the Dodgers and 5.5 up on San Diego. And yet, if you asked those same hundred analysts, I’d wager only a handful — maybe none — would switch their money to the Giants now.

Betting markets certainly aren’t buying into them; they have just the fifthbest odds (5/1 at BetMGM) to win the NL pennant — behind both the Dodgers (+170) and Padres (9/2).

And here’s the deal: Even at those odds, I’m not biting. According to my projection system, THE BAT X, the Giants project to win just the ninth-most games in the NL over the rest of the season. The projections at FanGraphs are a bit more optimistic, pegging them for seventh-most. PECOTA at Baseball Prospectus is most pessimistic.

Check out the projected win percentage of each system: FanGraphs .501; THE BAT X: .487; PECOTA: .457.

So why does everyone hate the Giants? Quite simply, because they’re over-performing any reasonable expectation almost across the board. If you compare the wOBA (Weighted On-Base Average — the best measure of a hitter’s contribution to his team’s run-scoring) of each of the 10 hitters with the most plate appearances for the Giants to THE BAT X’s projected wOBA, all but two (Alex Dickerson and Austin Slater) have exceeded their projection. Collectively, they’ve exceeded projection by 25 points.

Buster Posey is having the secondbest season of his career at age 34. Brandon Crawford, also 34, is having his best. These aren’t realistic outcomes, and they can’t be expected to continue. Posey and Crawford (and several others) almost have to get worse. Historically, players with late-career, mid-year spikes like this don’t keep it up. The smart bet is regression, and that’s why every projection system thinks the Giants are due for a fall. Even with their lead, after factoring in projected talent levels and strength of remaining schedule, THE BAT X projects them to lose handily to LA.

THE BAT X’s final projected NL West standings: Dodgers 98.2-63.8; Giants 92.7-69.3; Padres 90.5-71.5; Rockies 71.3-90.7; Diamondbacks 57.3-104.7.

Despite what may well be a wholly mediocre limp down the stretch, San Francisco does still project to beat out San Diego. If we were starting from scratch, the Padres would project to win nine more games than San Francisco over 162 games, but as it stands they have three fewer games left to play, which will make climbing out of their hole difficult.

I hate betting favorites. It’s boring. It feels like a copout. But if you’re making a bet on the NL West, it’s gotta be the Dodgers. Their -225 to win the division implies a 69 percent chance to win, but their true odds are in the low-to-mid70s range, according to THE BAT. PECOTA gives them a 78 percent chance.

If you want a better payout, you can still get them at +170 to win the NL or +375 to win the World Series. Over a full 162 games, they’d project seven wins better than the second-best team in MLB (Houston), even with their current injuries. We all know the Dodgers are great, and the answer doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

ACTION

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2021-07-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

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