National experts, oddsmakers still don’t believe in SF Giants

The Giants spent the entire season proving that baseball experts and Vegas oddsmakers just don’t get it. And, judging by their postseason predictions, they still don’t understand what this Giants team is all about.

A glance at the latest odds and projections show San Francisco’s still not a World Series favorite, or even favored to win the National League pennant.

Never have a whopping 107 regular season victories been so dismissed.

Giants manager Gabe Kapler referenced the non-believers while addressing the Oracle Park Crowd following San Francisco’s NL West title-clinching win Sunday.

“We all knew what the projections were and what the industry thought of us as a club,” Kapler said. “There were some intangibles that those viewpoints and those projections failed to take into consideration.”

Kapler mentioned toughness, grit and vision as the keys to the Giants proving to their doubters that they’re much, much better than the 70-win ballclub some experts envisioned this spring.

And yet, a survey of postseason predictions by baseball experts from FOX Sports, Sporting News and Sports Illustrated proves no one’s convinced the Giants are for real. Out of all those publications’ experts, not a single one sees the Giants hoisting the World Series trophy this year.

“None of us are picking the Giants to even reach the World Series,” tweeted Sports Illustrated’s Will Laws on his organization’s 22-person panel. “San Francisco has gotta be the most underestimated 107-win team in history.”

ESPN, which had projected the Giants to win 70 games this season, actually has five of its 36 baseball experts predicting San Francisco as the new champion. Included in that number is Giants play-by-play announcer Dave Flemming, who obviously doesn’t need to be convinced that what he witnessed this year was the real deal.

Former major leaguer Doug Glanville, one of Flemming’s ESPN colleagues, also picked the Giants to win the World Series.

“The Giants are the best team in baseball,” Glanville wrote. “They have excelled through pitching by reaching manager Gabe Kapler’s goals of gaining count leverage, having a low walk rate and winning strike one. But home runs matter. And they have hit the most in the NL while giving up the fewest in all of baseball. They strike quickly and neutralize their opponent from doing the same. They have a winning formula, and all season long it has worked against everyone.”

It took nearly six months, but MLB.com’s Alyson Footer admitted she was dead wrong all along about the Giants.

“I’ve spent the past five months waiting for the Giants to come back down to Earth and finish in third place in the NL West, just as most of us predicted when the season started,” Footer wrote. “ ‘They’re a first-half team!’ ‘They’re too old to withstand a full season!’ ‘Their rotation is patchwork with a bunch of No. 3s!’ Boy were we wrong. (And by we, I mean, me.) So mark me down as firmly on the San Francisco bandwagon. “

For bettors, the dethroned eight-time NL West champion Dodgers remain the favorite to win the world championship for the second consecutive season at SportsBetting.ag. At +350, Los Angeles is the top choice, followed by the Astros, Giants and Rays, all of whom are bunched together near +525.

On the other hand, should San Francisco reach the Series it would suddenly become America’s team, according to the odds for its most likely matchup. SportsBetting.ag has +1200 odds the Giants and Houston Astros (a.k.a. Asterisks?) will meet for the world title later this month.