The Giants surprised everyone in the industry in 2021, even themselves to a certain extent. They also shocked the computers, which is somewhat ironic given how data-driven the organization has become.
FanGraphs gave them about a 5 percent chance of making the postseason last year, and that was nearly entirely made up of Wild Card Game hopes. They projected the Giants to win 76 games and put their odds of winning the NL West at 0.2 percent. PECOTA picked them to finish fourth in the NL West with 75 wins, four fewer than the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The Giants got a kick out of the projections last spring, particularly because they had quietly made a division title their in-house goal. Six months later, a franchise-record 107 wins brought them a division title.
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You would think that the 2021 season would change some calculations, but as this season approaches, the Giants are once again picked to finish third in the NL West by both FanGraphs and PECOTA. As he got his players ready at Scottsdale Stadium last month, manager Gabe Kapler said he had seen the projections. He likes to check in on them.
"I read projections. I think they're important, I think they shape the opinions of a lot of people," Kapler said. "I don't buy into them. I fully expect our team to be more competitive and more successful than the projections suggest we will be."
FanGraphs projects the Giants at 85 wins, about 10 fewer than the Dodgers and five behind the San Diego Padres. They give the Dodgers a 65 percent chance of winning the West, put the Padres at 26 percent, and the Giants at 9 percent, which, to be fair, is a huge increase from last season. They have the Giants at 47.5 percent to make an expanded postseason field and 2.2 percent to win the World Series.
PECOTA, which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithms -- you can see why they go with the acronym -- is Baseball Prospectus' version and takes past performances to project the most likely outcome for the upcoming season. Fueled mostly by a lack of faith in the Giants' lineup (they are ranked 14th in the NL in projected runs), PECOTA has them at 78-84, with a 13 percent chance of reaching the postseason but just a 0.4 percent chance of winning the West again.
San Francisco Giants
PECOTA has the Dodgers at an MLB-best 101 wins, and it's hard to argue with their faith in Los Angeles. The Dodgers -- after the Freddie Freeman addition -- will lead every power rankings list that's put out this week, and they've earned that. They've won at least 100 games in three of the last four full seasons.
The Giants feel they've earned the benefit of the doubt with their 2021 performance, but they'll once again go into the year as underdogs. Kapler may be as numbers-driven as any manager in MLB history, but he knows there's more to the equation in San Francisco than platoon splits and spin rates. He's confident the Giants again have the on- and off-field characteristics that will surprise projection systems.
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"I think it didn't evaluate our talent," he said when asked what PECOTA and others missed last season. "Those projection systems, and I don't know if it was any specific public-facing site or PECOTA or anything else -- they were all kind of in the same realm, and I imagine they'll all be in the same realm (this year) and as we add roster pieces those will probably fluctuate a little bit. I'm not necessarily sure they'll fluctuate dramatically, but a little bit.
"I think they're not always great at evaluating talent, I think they're not always great at evaluating makeup, and they're not always great at evaluating a team-first, unselfish mentality that I think our players embodied last year and will embody again this year."