After a 2-0 loss at home to the Atlanta Braves on Friday night, the San Francisco Giants now have a record of 20-30, good for the fourth-worst record in MLB. They’re better than that, and will likely soon play better than that.
The Colorado Rockies (32-18) and Arizona Diamondbacks (31-19) are owners of the top two records in the National League. While they appear to be legitimately good teams, they’re almost surely worse than their current records say, and will likely soon play worse than that.
The true talent of these three teams seems very close on paper. Heck, FanGraphs’ rest-of-season projections have the Giants winning more games over the remainder of the season than either the Rockies or Diamondbacks.
It’s still early. We’re not even in June. We’re not even 1/3 of the way through the season yet. Madison Bumgarner has only made four starts this season (on the disabled list with a shoulder injury), and he’ll likely return for the second half. Johnny Cueto has a 4.64 ERA after a 2.79 ERA last season (with his lowest mark being 3.44 since 2011), so it’s fair to assume he’ll pitch much better. Hunter Pence has been banged up, and he should give their struggling offense a much-needed boost when he’s right.
So all of that doesn’t sound too bad. And yet, the Giants are very likely out of playoff contention already.
San Francisco will enter play on Saturday 11 games behind the Diamondbacks, and 12 games behind the Rockies. That’s a significant gap, even with 112 games remaining.
You may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned the Los Angeles Dodgers yet, given the Dodgers are currently third in the NL West behind Arizona and Colorado, and the Giants are “just” 9.5 games behind them. Well, I’m just not buying that the Dodgers fail to win the West, and the projection systems agree. FanGraphs projects the Dodgers for 97 wins, Baseball Prospectus projects them for 94 wins, and Five Thirty Eight projects them for 96 wins. In all three projection systems, the Dodgers win the division by several games, despite being 2.5 games back of the Rockies right now.
FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan had a terrific article earlier in the week examining the meaning of a team’s 50-game record, and his findings showed that a team’s record through 50 games is generally six (!) times less important than what preseason projections say about the team:
Actual performance through 50 games isn’t worth nothing. But if you look at those coefficients, the preseason team projection is more than six times more important. To try to put it a different way, if you want to predict rest-of-season success, you use both the numbers, but the projection number is weighted more than six times more heavily.
The point is a simple one. There’s substance in the projections. Even more substance than there is in actual 50-game performance. Both samples of data matter, and you shouldn’t just ignore what a team has already done. But when in doubt, consider the projections first.
This is why the Dodgers should still be the clear favorites in the NL West, and why we shouldn’t go overboard with teams like the Milwaukee Brewers and Minnesota Twins just yet. And you could then say the same thing about not getting too crazy about the Rockies or Diamondbacks, but as Sullivan says:
The greatest value of early performance is really just putting some wins in the bank. That’s what the Rockies have *really* achieved.
The Rockies already have 32 wins, and the Diamondbacks already have 31 wins. They may not actually be great teams, but they don’t have to be the rest of the season to have a terrific shot at the two National League Wild Card slots. That’s the position these teams have put themselves in over 50 games.
To get to 85 wins (which probably won’t even be enough), the Giants need to go 65-47. The Rockies need to go just 53-59, while the Diamondbacks need to go just 54-58.
Let’s say it takes 90 wins to get a Wild Card slot. The Giants need to go 70-42, the Rockies need to go 58-54, and the Diamondbacks need to go 59-53.
Giants lose 2-0. At 3.32 runs per game, they’ve passed the Royals and officially have the lowest-scoring team in the Majors.
— Alex Pavlovic (@PavlovicNBCS) May 27, 2017
So to get a Wild Card slot, the Giants would likely need to play .600 baseball — something only the Cubs did last year — over their remaining 112 games, and likely have two of the Rockies, Diamondbacks, and St. Louis Cardinals (23-22) disappoint the rest of the way. Again, the Rockies and Diamondbacks may not be anywhere near as good as their current records say, but they probably just have to be around .500 teams for the rest of the season to be good enough for a Wild Card berth.
If the Giants don’t close the gap considerably over the next 1-2 months, will they accept what they are and become sellers at the trade deadline?
That would probably be in their best interest.
The Dodgers are on another level, and are set up to be that way for a while. And right now, it seems the Diamondbacks and Rockies have caught up to the Giants as well.
San Francisco’s farm system is considered a below average unit right now, and the core talent at the MLB level is an aging group. They have several pieces that could interest contenders at the deadline, such as recently signed closer Mark Melancon (rumored to be a target for the Nats again), Hunter Pence, Eduardo Nunez, Denard Span, and perhaps even Johnny Cueto. Trading Cueto could bring back significant prospects for a farm system in need of them, and it’s very possible he exercises his opt-out clause to become a free agent this offseason anyway.
This is unusual territory for a team that’s won three championships since 2010, and it will be interesting to see how they respond. But even if they do pick up their play substantially, the gap may already be too large for it to matter.
