Opening Day is finally here for the Giants and with it the first installment of my attempts to handicap how the series will play out.

Normally for this I have the statistics from the season in progress to go off of when doing this but seeing as the season hasn't started yet, I will use the ZiPS Projections and the Baseball Musings Lineup Analysis tool with lineups from MLB Depth Charts as a proxy and as the season goes along I will weight the actual stats more and more as the season progresses.

So here are the probable pitching match-ups courtesy of MLB.com:

Tim Lincecum vs. Ian Kennedy
Madison Bumgarner vs. Daniel Hudson
Matt Cain vs. Josh Collmenter

According to my projections this should be a very closely contested match-up, on a neutral site the Giants would be favored in every game but with the home filed advantage that I have built in the Diamondbacks actually get the slight edge in the first two games. Overall the odds are not much different than a coin flip so hopefully that means some good baseball games.

	D-Backs	Giants	Total Runs
Game 1	52%	48%	6.5
Game 2	51%	49%	6.8
Game 3	47%	53%	7.5
Sweep	12%	12%
2 out 3	38%	38%
1 out 3	38%	38%
0 out 3	12%	12%
Win Series	50%	50%
Lose Series	50%	50%

One other new thing I might do this year is keep track of how well my series projector does against the over/under as a way to test it out against the online sports books to see if maybe I have another career that I can move to down the road.

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