The big thing that jumps at you from the standings is the Giants record agains teams that are better than .500, this season they have .719 winning percentage against the best teams in the league while manageing a winning percentage of only .424 against the bottom teams. I am not sure what to make of this perhaps they are playing at the level of the competitioin, but they have the best mark in the league against winning teams. That would be good news for the playoffs if this isn't just some anomoly of luck that will even out over the course of the season.

If they maintain the same pace they will be a 92 win team which would hopefully be good enough to get into the playoffs. It would also be the best record that the team has posted since the 100 win team of 2003.


The season has had quite a few ups and downs this season. As you can see from one of my favorite charts the Giants over their last 20 games have played very well adding 8 games between them and a .500 record, but if the past has any perdictive value there will be some more rough patches to make it through up a head.

I have created a companion for this graph as well that tracks all the teams in the division relative to first place.

Any thing above 0 means that the team is in 1st place every thing below is how many games back from 1st they are. There isn't a whole lot of analysis that can come out of this but it is a nice visual representation of the division race.

This years team has had trouble scoring runs so I created some graphs to have a look at how things have played out this season.

The first graph is the runs per scored for each game this season.


The black line is a 5 game moving average and the dotted red line is the season average of 4.3 runs per game.

This is an interesting graph but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to glean from it. The rise and falls match up pretty close to the peaks and valley's that you can see in the games above .500 graph, but that is to be expected as runs and wins are highly correlated.

The next graph shows the run distribution of runs scored and runs allowed.


This graph is pretty interesting. When you look at the league as a whole the graph will be much more normally distributed with the peak around 5.5 runs but for the Giants this season the magic number has been 6 runs which they have scored 15 times. The next closest is 5 runs with 8 occurances and then 1 and 2 runs each with frequencies of 7. After 6 runs there is a large drop off with only a hand full of really high scoring games. This is a fairly odd distribution as the peak is realitivly far from the average of 4.3 runs.

For the runs allowed the peak is at 2 runs per game and is follows a much more typical distribution. From this you can definitly see how good the Giants pitching has been this season for the most part scoring a lot of runs on this team has not been easy and is a rare occurance.

Checking up on the players:

Pitchers:
The piching has been great this season. The staff lead by Lincecum and Cain had dominate stretches. got off to a great start and has pitched very well this season and is having his best season with the Giants. has to be the best number 4 starter in the league who has really excelled this season and deserves much better than his 5 and 5 record. The one sore spot has been who is not a very good pitcher away from AT&T park, hopefully his days in the rotation are numbered and the spot will be 's for the stretch run.

The Giants bullpen has caused a few heart palpatations this season but it is an excellent collection of power arms. has been a bit of a disapointment this year but his numbers from last year were definitly inflated and were not going to be sustainable. has had a few pitches that were mistakes that really cost him but other thatn that has been one of the best guys on the staff with his nasty frisbe slider. New comer is a flame throwing monster and I am not sure why the A's let him go for nothing. Lastly has been pure awesome and while he has walked the high wire a few times in his saves he has had a special season.