Although the real dog days of August are weeks away, this week’s Major League Baseball schedule marks one of the first times this year when a large number of teams will have to deal with summer weather as a factor. Even for games with 7:30 start times, afternoon summer heat has absorbed into the field and surrounding concrete structures, making some ballparks a veritable oven at the time of first pitch.

The way environment and weather can affect the outcome of a game is just one of many factors that typically confronts the participants in the weekly UNU Baseball Swarm. In addition to weather, swarm users look at factors from starting pitchers to bullpen effectiveness to teams on hot streaks or teams that are slumping.

Those different factors and the way they’re weighted can cause the Swarm AI to make some predictions that may not seem obvious at first. For instance, tonight on the coast the Giants host the Royals. It’s a matchup of two struggling teams in their respective leagues, so perhaps the temptation would be to favor the home team with all else being equal. But the swarm may have noted that the Royals have had a spate of wins lately, and that tonight they’re starting surprising Jason Vargas, an unlikely early front-runner for the AL Cy Young. Thus, not only does the swarm pick the Royals, they do so with a surprising amount of conviction here.