Projecting the Series: Giants vs Diamondbacks

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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