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.
Milwaukee Brewers
Vegas projection: 78 wins
My projection: 77 wins
Current record/pace: 38-52 (68-win pace)
Season-to-date pricing: 78.6 wins
What's gone right: With a .296/.378/.521 batting profile, Adam Lind has patched the gaping hole at first base that's existed since the departure of Prince Fielder after the 2011 season.
Also aiding in that cause has been a bounce-back year from Ryan Braun. He's no longer a fixture as an MVP candidate, nor even an All-Star, but he's putting up well above average, 4.0 WAR-type numbers at the plate again. Additionally, the bullpen, which had been a weak spot in recent years when the Brewers were trying to protect leads, has featured Royals-like late-inning production. Francisco Rodriguez, Will Smith, and Michael Blazek have combined for 109 innings of 1.65 ERA late-inning relief; if only they had more leads to protect.
What's gone wrong: Despite Lind's production and Braun's mild revival, the blueprint to score 700 runs went up flames when Jonathan Lucroy's 2014 turned out to be an outlier. Like the Seattle-based rapper who captured Grammys in 2014, Lucroy received significant backing in MVP voting only to be mostly forgotten in 2015. As part of Lucroy's superb season, he had 68 extra-base hits a year ago, 16 more than the next-best catcher, Buster Posey; at this year's All-Star break he has seven.
The rotation, which I labeled as "barely-above-replacement-level" in the Brewers' 2015 preview, has been considerably worse, as Kyle Lohse and Matt Garza have ERAs just-above and just-below 6.00 respectively. It's not unusual for any team to have a couple of spot starters with ugly ERAs, but Lohse leads the team in innings pitched and Garza isn't far behind.
Second-half outlook: After 81 games of the 2014 season, the Brewers were 49-32 and had the best record in the National League. In the full season of games that Milwaukee subsequently played, it went 66-96. In that time period, the Brewers have won just one more game than the Rockies and two more than the Phillies, and it took a four-game sweep of the Phillies to finish the first half of their 2015 schedule to achieve that status.
By comparison, no other MLB team has won fewer than 70 games over the second half of last year and the first half of this one. The Brewers have firmly established themselves as the worst team in a very good division, which probably relegates them to teardown status. Whether they go that route or not is a decision for the front office, but for our purposes, the Brewers are a bad team, overmatched in their division. Based on the generous support they still receive from oddsmakers -- their pricing in games 42-81 was actually higher than the first 41 games -- they are a go-against candidate just above every night.