Since 2010, the San Francisco Giants have been somewhat quietly one of the most consistent teams in baseball. While they have only made the playoffs in 2010, 2012, and 2014 in this span (let alone winning the World Series in each of those three years), they've been a solid above .500 team in the other seasons (except 2013, that was a down year). But the one thing that I give respect to the Giants is that they win and lose respectably unlike some other teams in the league as well as not exactly having that "All-Star" lineup (this year they sent Bumgarner, Cueto and Posey, which is pretty much all the noise the Giants have this year). The Giants don't make any big trades (Cueto was definitely their biggest acquisition, but whether or not you want to call it a "big splash" in the grand scheme of the league is up for interpretation). The Giants are just there. Winning. One of the keys to their success is the fact that their core personnel hasn't changed drastically since 2010. They'll always have solid pitching, and always have a decent offense, which is why they've posted 92, 86, 94, 76, 88, and 84 wins since 2010 respectively. They don't have holes for other teams to poke through.
Which is somewhat looping around to my point, last I checked, and if I can do math correctly (taking Calc 3 this summer has questioned my judgement at times), 2016 is an even year and the Giants entered the All-Star break with the best record, a couple games above my beloved Cubbies (whose hype has sadly died to make room for the even year hype). Hardly anyone was talking about the Giants at the beginning of the season, no thanks to the Cubs, but now is the time of year where people need to start realizing who are the contenders and who aren't. The All-Star break historically has shown sooooommmmeeee trends in how a team will perform in the second half, and some of you readers might recognize this as something I did last year, well because it is. Except this year I've added a bit more analysis woohoo. So let's take a brief few minutes and take a look at this year's possible playoff contenders now that we have half of baseball out of the way:
