The San Francisco Giants are the hottest team in baseball. They’re also playing the best.
After waiting for us all to begin our obituaries for them, the Giants have rattled off 10 wins in their last 11 games, and they haven’t been cheapies, either. Five of those wins came against elite teams, three game in the hellscape that is Coors Field, and the total score in the 11 games was a whopping 86-47.
And along the way, the San Diego Padres and New York Mets, two teams infamous for their ability to suffer
late-season collapses … have started to have late season collapses.
The Giants still aren’t in a particularly good position. With just 22 games remaining, they’re four games behind the Mets for the final Wild Card spot, and five games behind the Padres. They also have the tiebreaker against neither team, meaning that they need to gain five and six games, respectively. Fangraphs gives the team just a 4.3% chance of making the postseason.
But there are, of course, reasons for optimism. Mainly the fact that the Giants are playing really well and the Padres and Mets are not, and that another epic collapse by San Diego or New York would be too funny not to happen. The Giants have a fairly light schedule the rest of the way, with 12 of their 22 games at home, and 15 of their games against teams with losing records (though the other seven are against the Los Angeles Dodgers).
It probably isn’t going to happen. In fact, it almost surely isn’t going to happen.
And yet … I can’t help but feeling some semblance of belief.
