In the Worldwide Leader’s annual act of making-so-many-predictions-you’re-probably-going-to-get-at-least-one-right, the panel of so-called experts made their picks for MLB division winners and World Series champions for the 2014 season. The Dodgers and the Nationals were the big winners, snagging eleven and twelve votes to win the World Series, respectively. The Giants…not so much.

Thirty-eight of the 44 total experts on the site picked the Dodgers to win the NL West, with three votes going to the Giants, two to the Diamondbacks, and ESPN.com’s Michael Knisley alone sticking his head out for the Padres. The Giants won a surprising 20 votes to win one of the wild card spots. In an unrelated-but-let’s-find-the-silver-lining connection, Pedro Gomez knows Barry Bonds pretty well, and picked the Giants after watching Bonds as a hitting coach this spring.  That’s basically a guarantee.

Just for laughs though, let’s look at how the experts did last year!  Continue reading →

Max Scherzer is having a very good season. This has been the best season of his career, by quite a large margin. He’s missing bats, his walks are down, and he’s turned into one of the best pitchers in the American League. Still, the most important thing to help his case for the Cy Young Award happened four years ago: he joined the Detroit Tigers.

Scherzer currently leads the league in wins, with an absurd 18-1 record. He nabbed his latest victory on Sunday when his Tigers topped the Kansas City Royals, 6-3. In fact, Sunday’s game represented Scherzer’s season perfectly. Scherzer pitched eight strong innings, gave up just two runs and five baserunners, and struck out four batters. Meanwhile, Miguel Cabrera launched his 40th homer of the season, four Tigers doubled, and every batter who came to bat for Detroit got at least one hit.

This is not an anomaly. The Tigers have scored 626 runs this season, averaging a majors-best 5.05 runs per game. 151 of these runs have come in Scherzer’s 25 starts, giving him an average of 6.04 runs of support per game, the best in the majors.

For White Sox starter Chris Sale, July 27 was a representation of his season. On that fateful Saturday evening, Sale tossed a complete game, striking out seven and allowing just one run. The South Siders, however, were completely helpless against Royals starter Wade Davis and his then-5.92 ERA, and the Sox lost 1-0. Sale took the loss, his tenth of the season.

Continue reading →

For a little off-day madness, I decided to play our old game, G-Minus. In case you missed our introduction, G-Minus basically takes a pitcher’s career statistics and strips them of their games against the Giants, and compares the results. Let’s see how this works for Reds starting pitcher Bronson Arroyo.

Arroyo Career Stats: 133-122, 4.17 ERA in 343 starts.

Arroyo Stats Against Giants: 5-5, 2.69 ERA in 13 starts. Hoo boy.

Then we remove the 87 IP and 26 ER that Arroyo has against the Giants… carry the 2…

Arroyo’s G-Minus Stats: 128-117, 4.23 ERA

That’s right, Bronson Arroyo’s starts against the Giants have lowered his ERA a full 0.06 over a pretty long career. Ouch.