Bay City Ball

All that nonsense about “watchable baseball”, well you can ignore it. The news flash of the day is that the Giants still look completely over matched when playing baseball. It’s almost getting to a sickening point, impressive in a sad way, in the different ways this team manages to lose games. Bullpen meltdowns? That is so 2006. All the new kids are dropping easy fly balls for 2 unearned runs! Get with the times gramps!

I can’t remember, in my short baseball life, watching so many pitchers pitch deep into the game, and pitch well, only to end up with a loss or a no decision. Poor Matt Cain is the poster boy for this scary new trend. Sporting a record of 2-9, most would delegate him to the lower crust of the starting pitchers. Matt Cain, meet your new friends Kip Wells (3-11), Woody Williams (3-10), Kyle Lohse (3-10), Paul Maholm (4-10), and Anthony Reyes (0-10). But whats that you say, just purely looking at W/L records are a foolish, and Joe Morgan-esque (read: stupid) way of looking at how much a pitcher is worth?

God bless you SABR nerds, with your crazy computers and funky statistics!

Cain, even though his peripherals have slipped some, which is the most alarming to me (mostly K rate), he really has pitched well this year. Don’t let that W/L record fool you, Cainer has done well this year, the offense on the other hand has not. Using ERA as a crude example, Cain ranks 14th in the NL with a 3.38 ERA. His VORP of 25.1 puts him 27th among all the starting pitchers in baseball (right behind Daisuke Matsuzaka) and 13th in the NL. Clearly he’s better than 2-9.

But those slipping peripherals also are a little concerning. His K/9 rate is down to 6.58 as opposed to his rate of 8.45 in 2006, which ranked him 4th in the NL last year among starting pitchers who threw 180 innings or more. Cain also leads the NL in walks with 50. In the most basic of terms, he’s striking out less hitters while walking more. What is helping Cain is that he’s still hard to hit, opponents are only batting .227 off of him. Ideally, in the 2nd half Cain would boost his K rate some and walk less hitters.

Back to the seesaw, it seems that every time the Giants win a few in a row, they drop a few in a row if not more than a few. The pitching continues to be good, and the bullpen for the most part has been good but the offense is still stinking up the joint. The Giants are 14th in Runs, SLG, and OPS (among such powerhouses as the Pirates and the Nats) How depressing is it that all fans have left to look forward to is the increasing media blitz around Bonds as he draws close to the all time home run record? Pretty damn depressing.

Comment Starter: Open bitching thread. Let’s have at it.