Your #SFGiants Playoff Update

The Standings

While the Giants may be playing games that some consider “insignificant,” (but if you’ve watched the pitching staff this year, you know these games are quite the opposite) here are the standings coming into today’s games:

 

The National League has four of its five players locked in, with the fifth player still to be decided. Atlanta has an outside shot of winning the East, just as Milwaukee has an outside chance of outing St. Louis. However, St. Louis gets to dine in on an early taste of the playoffs by playing Cincy and Washington to finish the season while the Brewers play the Astros and Padres, and the Dodgers play the Rockies and Giants, so we could be in for a wild finish for that fifth spot.

Getting back to the Giants, they have three games between them and the Reds, and the Red Stockings won the season series 4-3 against the Gigantes, so there’s the tiebreaker. Should the Nationals find a way to tie the Giants, we remember very well the 5-1 advantage they have over San Francisco. Translation of all this: while the Giants do have a chance of losing the number 3 seed (and I believe the Giants have an advantage of being the 3), the Nats and Reds would have to go through a rather unlucky/bad streak of doing 4-5 games worse than the Giants. It’s not out of the question though that the Giants will go 5-1 or 6-0 in the next six games, just not something I’d bet on — the combination of all those wins and losses.

The Rotation

With the play-in games being played on a Friday, MLB has decided that the NL’s 2 and 3 seeds will play their first game on a Saturday, time TBD; and the #1 seed gets to fly to the play-in game’s winner for Sunday’s start to the series. I don’t know what Bochy and company have planned for the order of pitchers, but here’s what we have thus far:

Friday: Vogelsong

Saturday: Bumgarner

Sunday-Wednesday: ?

This bugs me that I don’t know what they’re up to with the pitching staff. I want to know! I want to know, gosh darnit! I took a stab at possible scenarios. This gets messed up if the Giants miss the #3 and get the #1. (SS) does not stand for “split squad,” but “short start,” that gets treated like a bullpen session just to keep the pitcher fresh.

 

Situations are not listed in any preferential order, just in the order I thought of them. For the record, I think my favorite option is “D” then “A.” If the Giants end up watching the Nats and Reds fold and they take “home-field advantage”… for the NLCS and WS, their series will start on Sunday.

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I’m sure we’ll hear more as the season ends, and I’m sure everyone will have an opinion on what they’d like to see in the coming days, but as long as Cain and Bumgarner are ready on full rest for Games 1 and 2, I’m good to go.