We're halfway through the 2015 Major League Baseball season, which means wins have been banked, the St. Louis Cardinals are dusting off the playoff-ticket printing press and the Philadelphia Phillies have confirmed tee times for the first week in October.
But most importantly for our purposes, spring training projections can be evaluated because history tells us at least 70 percent of October's participants have been identified. MLB's 10-team postseason is only four years old, but from 2012 to 2014, a minimum of seven of the 10 teams slotted for the playoffs at the All-Star break each year have made it to the postseason. Overall, 22 of the 30 teams that made the playoffs would have also made the playoffs if the season ended at that year's All-Star break.
Of course, attempting to identify the other teams is the fun part of handicapping. So let's dig into the first half of the 2015 season, compare results with expectations and possibly find some over- and undervalued teams for the next three months.
Note: Records are reflective of all games played through Sunday.
All statistics are through each team's 81st game.
Season-to-date pricing adds the implied win probability from the money line of each team's first 81 games and converts it to 162 games. For instance, a team that was minus-150 (60 percent win probability) in each of its first 81 games would be valued as a 97.2 (60 percent x 162) win team.
Philadelphia Phillies
Vegas projection: 67.5 wins
My projection: 65 wins
Current record/pace: 29-62 (52-win pace)
Season-to-date pricing: 69.2 wins
What has gone right: Under-23 third baseman Maikel Franco has looked fantastic in his first 200-plus trips to the plate.
Also potentially helping the next incarnation of Phillies is that Cole Hamels' (3.63 ERA) and Jonathan Papelbon's (1.60 ERA) trade values have not diminished. It remains to be seen what kind of return the Phillies can get for the last two pieces of value they possess.
What's gone wrong: While virtually all of the Phillies' travails in 2015 were telegraphed years ago, one thing that has been somewhat shocking is the demise of Chase Utley. Criminally under-supported in MVP voting from 2005-2009 (including twice at the expense of his less-valuable teammates Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Howard), Utley is a borderline Hall of Famer whose injury-marred, over-30 seasons will most likely keep him out of Cooperstown. In 2015, at minus-1.3 WAR, he's simply been the worst player in baseball.
One month into the season, FiveThirtyEight made the case that Utley was simply unlucky, but despite a small bump in production for a couple of weeks after that article was published, he's once again mired in a brutal slump. With just five hits in his last 64 plate appearances, Utley is again well south of the Mendoza line and truly looks finished as a player.
Elsewhere on the roster things are so bad that it's been necessary to label anyone else's 29th-ranked unit as "the worst in baseball, excluding the Phillies" to give context to the performance. Philadelphia's defense, exacerbated by a pitching staff that strikes out batters at the third-lowest rate in the NL, is so bad that it's on a pace to give up 70 more runs versus just an average defense.
Second-half outlook: There won't be any "under" tickets that will be any easier to cash than this one and yet, amazingly, this has been a pretty easy bet to press. The Phillies were priced as a 71-win team over their first 41 games of the season, and a 67-win team over their next 40 games. The Phillies weren't a 67-win team on Opening Day, even with Cole Hamels on the mound.
It may look shocking to see a team listed as an underdog every time it takes the field (the Phils have been favored just four times since June 1), but remember this: If you think the Phillies are a 100-loss team regardless of circumstances, every time you can bet against them laying minus-165 or less, there's value. The fact that you could do that last Friday night, with Madison Bumgarner on the mound in San Francisco, was a bit shocking to me.