SF Giants' playoff odds with a month to go: San Fran hanging around in tough race
The 2023 season has been a bit of a rollercoaster for the San Francisco Giants. However, with around a month to go in the season, it does appear that the Giants have put themselves in a pretty decent position despite fielding an offense that has struggled to do much of anything lately.
The National League West race that looked tight a month or so ago is now firmly out of reach thanks to the Dodgers remembering that they are the Dodgers. With LA now running away with the division, the Giants hopes have turned to the wild card race.
Despite going only 11-15 in August, the Giants continue to cling for dear life on to the last wild card spot with the Diamondbacks and Reds lurking close behind. For the moment, it appears as though the Giants are in a decent, if uncomfortable, spot heading into the home stretch.
Predicting a team's playoff chances is notoriously difficult when looking at a month's sample of games across the league and that is particularly true when looking at tight races like the NL wild card. As a result, it is important to look at multiple sources to get a more complete picture here as each prediction engine handles all the various variables differently.
Case in point: when looking at Fangraphs' playoff odds for this season, the Giants have zero chance of winning the division, but sport a 60.8% chance of making the playoffs as of 8/31. For the particularly optimistic Giants fans, San Francisco has a 2.1% of winning the World Series. Dream big, folks.
The fine folks over at Baseball-Reference have put together their own playoff odds and the picture for the Giants is decidedly less rosy. B-Ref has the Giants with just a 46.2% chance of making the playoffs while giving San Francisco a similarly dire chance of winning the NL West.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Giants have some tough series coming up. A couple series against the Rockies are likely to help the cause in September, but San Francisco also has tough series against the Cubs and Diamondbacks coming up and they end their season with seven contests against the Dodgers in their final 10 games. Hopefully LA will be resting some of their everyday guys by then, otherwise that could be a really tough stretch.
