SF Giants Elimination Number after a tough week of games

The Giants are in real trouble when it comes to their playoff chances in 2023.

Eric Cole

Sep 15, 2023; Denver, Colorado, USA; San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Logan Webb (62) leaves / Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

While the San Francisco Giants are hanging around in the National League wild card race, they have been definitely trending in the wrong direction lately. Since 9/12, the Giants are 2-5 including an embarrassing series loss to the Rockies with their postseason chances hanging by a thread.

The Giants falling on their faces could not have come at a worse time. With the Dodgers essentially locking up the division a while ago, San Francisco had to keep pace with the rest of the NL wild card field to have a chance and as we will see, they have instead done anything but that.

SF Giants Elimination Number and Playoff Odds - 9/20

That was a long-winded way of saying that at 3 games out of a playoff spot with both the Marlins and Reds ahead of them in the quest to steal the last wild card spot from the Cubs. Anything that is a "magic number" sort of thing is a little tricker to parse with multiple teams to compare against, but the simple version is that the Giants' wild card elimination number is 9. That doesn't account for tiebreakers which isn't great news for the Giants as the Cubs handily won the season series with San Francisco, although they do hold the tiebreaker over Miami and Cincinnati.

The end result is that the Giants' playoff odds are looking very grim. Fangraphs has San Francisco with just a 5.3% chance of making it to the playoffs while Baseball-Reference likes their chances even less in giving them just a 1.6% of making it to the postseason.

In short, the Giants are going to have to figure things very soon and still probably need some help ahead of them in the standings. If they can't, they be watching the playoffs from home wondering what might have been.

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Eric Cole

I started my career writing about baseball covering the Atlanta Braves for SB Nation's Talking Chop back in 2015 which has since been renamed Battery Power. After years of writing for those fine folks, I made the decision to take over as Site Expert at House That Hank Built before becoming a full-time MLB Staff Writer for FanSided in 2023. Along the way, I have been a guest on multiple ESPN radio affiliates as well as 680 The Fan and 92.9 The Game to discuss Braves baseball and especially Braves prospects and was a long-time host on the Battery Power podcast. These days, I continue to write about the Braves as well as covering the Astros, Padres, and Angels with particular expertise with minor league coverage, the MLB Draft, and bashing Anthony Rendon when possible. When I am not writing about or talking about baseball (which is seldom), I am an avid baseball card collector (Maddux and Soroka being my primary personal collections) and I also collect shark teeth. All other sports are mostly dead to me as my Bills have broken my heart too many times.