Quantifying Hope: You Can Take It Off the Board…YES!

The folks at @BovadaLV just released their latest odds. They took the NL Central off the board. pic.twitter.com/8FVRGAeMZL

— Jose de Jesus Ortiz (@OrtizKicks) July 1, 2016

While my Twitter mentions are filled with doom and gloom from fans wanting to throw the Cubs in a tomb, I just look at the division standings to see all the room and I say, “Boom!” Apparently, Bovada (a large online gambling site) felt the same way, because they blew up the odds for NL Central betting.

It’s not even worthwhile for Vegas to keep taking your money.

A home sweep at the hands of the Cards? Meh. Dropping three of four in Miami? Shrug. Even after their gut-wrenching loss in Queens Thursday night, the Cubs woke up to find themselves 11 games up in the Central. You can call Jason Heyward a bust all you want and you can set a match to the tinder that is the bullpen. Or you can look at a team forced to give significant playing time to rookies and out-of-position players due to injury and see that they’ve still got room to improve.

Either way you slice it, the Cubs are 51-27 and have all kinds of time to address any issues they face heading into the second half of the season. FanGraphs (99.8% and Baseball Prospectus (99.9%) continue to show them as playoff locks, so the Bovada news isn’t exactly a deviant projection. The Cubs are going to the postseason, now they just need to get to work on sanding off all those rough edges.

And I’m perfectly happy with the master carpenters who will be guiding that process.