Never tell me the odds

I mean, unless they're good, but what are the odds of that?

The new PECOTAs are here! The new PECOTAs are here!

It’s the beginning of February, and that means that the projection systems are whirring to life, telling us what to expect from our favorite teams as we head towards Spring Training, and then eventually the regular season. Did the computers tell us the Giants are going to surprise people this year? Did all the spreadsheets come together to tell a happy story? Did all the virtual monkeys on all the virtual abaci come up with numbers that, when you input them as ASCII characters, wind up spelling out the complete works of Shakespeare?

No.

The median Giants win total in the PECOTA projections is 78, meaning that on average, they are expected to go 78-84 this season. They have a 15% chance of making the playoffs, with a 14.9% chance of winning a wild card spot. So if you get one of those fictional monkeys up above to plug that into its fictional abacus, you get that the Giants have a 0.1% chance of winning the division. That’s one in a thousand, which honestly feels about right.

(Taking into account rounding, the chances could even be as low as one in two thousand, which honestly feels even more right.)

By comparison, the Rockies are expected to bring up the rear of the division, with a projected 55.5 wins, and a 0% chance of making the playoffs. Despite all their impressive young talent, the Padres are only a few games better than the Giants, with a projection of 79.5 wins and a 38% chance of making the playoffs. The Diamondbacks come out even better, with a projection of 86 wins and a 62% chance of making the playoffs. And that’s about it for the rest of the NL West, so no reason to talk about anyone else. There certainly isn’t a juggernaut on top of the standings with a median projection of 104 wins and a 100% chance of making the playoffs, so why even bring it up as a possibility?

The Giants, then, are likely to spend another year consigned to mediocrity. It’ll be like the Farhan years, except instead of being annoyed by the constant churn of AAAA talent, the team will leave each individual AAAA talent on the big league roster long enough for you to get extremely annoyed by him personally. Fewer Marks Mathias, more Bretts Wisely. That’s what the fans want, right?

But what about the X-factor? What about the fact that the Giants are overhauling their entire organizational philosophy? The calculations don’t take that into account, do they? The NERDS at BP who never PLAYED THE GAME just can’t see how much hustle and heart and hard work matter, can they? What if the Giants turn on the Old-School Baseball switch, and the rest of the league just has to reap the whirlwind? What then, huh?

And the answer is, that’s accounted for! BP cleverly provided a range of possibilities. For the Giants, the most likely one is that 78 win mark, but everyone involved fully acknowledges that sometimes teams outplay their projections, and that one number can’t possibly represent the total of a team’s potential for a year. That’s why they created a chart with ranges.

Well hey, look at that! It’s not completely out of the question for the Giants to be better than 78 wins. In fact, it’s completely plausible. A median possibility, by definition, means that half of the possibilities are higher and half are lower. Even though the odds are on their downward slop as we get to the .500 mark, they’re not, like, Kirk Rueter homering off Randy Johnson low. They’re more like Ray Durham homering off of Matt Morris low. It didn’t happen, no. But it could have!

The Giants, then, could be good. There is even an extremely low chance — extremely low, not really worth mentioning, and the very act of starting this sentence is itself a form of misleading my audience, because human brains aren’t configured to intuitively grasp extremely low probabilities — that they have a great season. But there’s just as much of a chance that they’re bad, and they have a better chance of being abysmal as they do of being great.

The Giants signed Willy Adames and a very old Justin Verlander, and then they hoped things wouldn’t go too wrong. Maybe it’ll work. I’d say probably not, and I’d also say that the chart above represents something pretty close to my opinion, but it’d be great to wind up on the far right side of that SF graph. Here’s hoping that Buster and Co landed on a formula for that kind of success, intead of living on the left side, where the team has mostly been since the beginning of 2017.