What to expect in the second half
On April 9, a nascent day of the 2021 baseball season, the venerable baseball stat repository Fangraphs estimated that the San Francisco Giants had a 3.4 percent chance of making the postseason.
A few months later, as baseball enters its postAll-star-game home stretch, the Giants have the best record in baseball.
So much for that algorithm.
No one saw this kind of season coming from the Giants. Even the Giants coaches and players who talked a big game in spring training deepdown didn’t expect this.
But it’s here. The only question now is how far the Giants can take it. What should we expect from San Francisco in the final 73 games?
I figure we break it down using those same Fangraphs probabilities.
Making the playoffs: 90.9 percent
With a start this strong, the Giants need to make the postseason. There are no two ways about it.
There will be trials and tribulations — the Giants’ schedule for the first three weeks of the second half is brutal — but this team has already fought through injuries and bad vibes. The Giants have proven they’re a rock-solid baseball team and a rock-solid baseball team can win 50 percent of its games for the rest of the year.
Do that, and the Giants will have more than 90 wins.
And looking around the National League, that should be more than enough to make the postseason. The NL Central has one good team — the Brewers (and that’s a stretch) — and no one in the NL East is worth worrying about. (The Marlins are in last place in that division with the secondbest run differential.)
Yes, there will be teams that make some runs, but the Giants’ head start is significant. As of Friday morning, they have a six-game lead in the wild card standings. They’re running a different race and it would have to be considered a disappointment if they fail to play at least one extra game in October.