Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
The Giants have made steady improvements this offseason and will return a team that is expected to be better than last season’s, which finished a game away from the postseason.
Their projected step forward has come while the Padres have taken a leap, though, and the Dodgers have no more steps to take.
The Giants are both better and likely further away from contention than they have been the past few seasons. That is what happens when the loaded Padres acquire Blake Snell and Yu Darvish and the reigning champion Dodgers just say the hell with it and sign reigning Cy Young winner Trevor Bauer.
Tommy La Stella and Curt Casali and Anthony DeSclafani and Alex Wood and etc. are nice, but as the Giants pile up savvy moves that could work out, their chief rivals raise the bar that much higher.
Major League Baseball announced Tuesday that there will be no expanded postseason this year (which, granted, could change at the last minute). Presuming just five NL teams make the playoffs and presuming LA and San Diego are the superpowers they seem like, that leaves the wild card as the Giants’ best path to the postseason — and the NL East, with the Mets, Braves, Nationals and Phillies, might be better than the NL West.
Of the two well-regarded projections to arrive this week, Fangraphs likes the Giants’ odds better than Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA. According to the Fangraphs model, San Francisco is projected to finish with 77.8 wins and 84.2 losses, about four games clear of the Diamondbacks for third in the division. Fangraphs gives the Giants an 8 percent chance at the postseason and .4 percent chance at the division. (So you’re saying there’s a chance!)
That projection has the Mets winning the NL East and Braves finishing with a wild-card spot. The weak NL Central also has a less-likely path to multiple playoff teams only because those teams will be playing the weak NL Central often.
And that’s the good news.
PECOTA, which stands for the catchy Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is an attempt to best estimate the range of games each team could win. There are, of course, scenarios in which the Giants win the division, but Baseball Prospectus’ projections like the Giants less than Fangraphs.
The estimate involves Gabe Kapler’s crew winning 75.3 games and losing 86.7, putting them about four games behind Arizona and fourth in the division. At least there will be wins to pile up against Colorado, which is projected to have triple-digit losses.
The Giants are taking a step in a season that probably required a jump.
