San Francisco Giants Power Rankings: Weeks 1 and 2

By Maggie Pilloton | Apr 14, 2015

The San Francisco Giants are the reigning World Series champions, but despite that, the team isn’t faring well in season projections or in the MLB power rankings so far this season.

The 2015 MLB season is only a couple weeks underway, but the Giants have already faced significant adversity with injuries to Hunter Pence, Matt Cain, Casey McGehee, Jake Peavy, Brandon Belt, and Travis Ishikawa. There are also several questions surrounding the team about the starting rotation, health, and the lack of power.

In addition, two of the Giants’ division rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, made several significant moves in the offseason that made them the favorites to win the NL West or at least earn a wild card playoff spot.

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The Giants have overcome low expectations and adversity before though (see 2010, 2012, and 2014 World Series titles), so anything is possible in 2015 for the Giants.

In this series of articles, we will examine where the Giants fall in the latest MLB power rankings. This week, we will take a look at the power rankings from ESPN, USA Today, Fox Sports, and MLB.com. CBS Sports and Yahoo! Sports also have done MLB power rankings in the past, but they don’t have completely up-to-date power rankings.

Let’s get started with ESPN.

On ESPN this week, the Giants were ranked in the 15th spot in all of MLB, which bumped them up slightly from their rank last week at the number 16th spot. Here’s what was said about the Giants:

"Only a week into the season, the odd-year jinx seems to be back in San Francisco. Matt Cain joined Hunter Pence on the disabled list to start the season and Jake Peavy, Brandon Belt and Casey McGehee have all battled minor injuries themselves. Depth is proving to be a huge issue already this season for the defending champs. — Andrew Tweedy (@WCBGiants), West Coast Bias"

On USA Today this week, the Giants were ranked a little higher than ESPN at the 13th spot. However, before this week, the USA Today writers had ranked the Giants in the eighth spot. The highest spot the Giants have occupied on the USA Today power rankings was sixth, and their lowest spot is their current spot at 13. The Giants also have 185 points in USA Today’s power rankings so far.

Here’s what they said about the Giants this week:

"At this rate, someone likely to get injured while they raise the championship flag Monday."

Ouch.

Fox Sports does their power rankings a little differently than the other platforms do. Instead of focusing on recent performance, Fox Sports instead focuses on playoff odds set by Baseball Prospectus.

With that being said, Fox Sports this week ranked the Giants in the 12th spot, as they had the 12th highest playoff odds in MLB at 32.3 percent. The highest spot they’ve been in is 12th, and the lowest spot they’ve been in is 14th, which is where they ranked last week. Here’s what they said about the Giants this week:

"The Giants might be taking the “odd numbered year” thing a bit too far. They’ve already lost three games, Hunter Pence, Matt Cain, Travis Ishikawa, and have a dinged up Casey McGehee."

MLB.com also does the power rankings slightly differently. They calculate a team’s overall power ranking using this equation: Power Rankings = Experts’ Rankings (75 percent) + Fan Rankings (25 percent).

On MLB.com this week, the Giants earned 54 points from the experts (which ranked 13th among the experts’ rankings of the other teams) and 17 points from fans (which ranked 14th among the fans’ rankings of other teams). This gave the Giants an overall power ranking of 71 points, which ranked 13th in MLB.

Which power ranking do you think is most accurate? Can the Giants move up in the power rankings next week? We’ll keep you updated.

Next: Giants' X-Factors in 2015

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