In today’s game against the A’s, Matt Cain pitched 9 innings of 1 run baseball with no walks and 9 strikeouts. Oddly enough, a major point with Cain this season has been that despite his newfound ability to win games — hint: sarcasm — some of his underlying peripherials have slipped slightly. Mostly his strikeouts and walks. There’s also been some concerns about his velocity as well.
You would be happy to know that in todays’ game, Matt Cain had one of his better fastballs of the year.
This plot shows the velocity on Cain’s pitches, pitch-by-pitch. The red line is the average velocity (92.8 mph) for his fastball during the start. Before entering the game today, by PFX, the average Cain fastball was clocked at 91.8 mph. Cain was throwing slightly harder today than usual. Another positive sign is that if you check his Fangraph’s velocity chart for the fastball, you can see that he’s been inching up slightly by start. I’d like to see his velocity chart by just home starts to remove any stadium bias, but it’s an interesting bit of information to sit on.
Cain is still posting an ungodly LOB% and his K/9 is still below his career levels — although it did finally breach 7 K’s per 9 IP after today’s start — but he pitched as well as you could hope for today. Of course, playing Oakland and their bottom-of-the-barrel offense didn’t hurt matters. But, the bounce-back in velocity is encouraging for Matt Cain.
Matt Cain makes me feel funny on the inside.
As Chris mentions, the number that concerns is his LOB%. He’s had some amazing starts–7 walk, 1 run sorts of starts-that can best be described as ‘man juggling chain saws.’ And we’re scoring runs for him (!). Luck, a whole lot of very good luck, for this previously unluckiest of pitchers. But Chris, rightly, suggests that he might be getting stronger as the season goes on, which has been his pattern, and could portend a season of ungodly numbers: as in, he’s 9-1, 2.38 ERA, and he hasn’t pitched well yet. He might get even better. Wow.
Unrelated matter: SI’s Truth and Rumors has an item out of Chicago suggesting a possible Giants trade for Derrek Lee. Yes, that’s Derrek Lee, 33 years old, whose OPS has declined each of the last three years, who is currently slugging .443 in one of the best hitting parks in the NL. The same item helpfully suggests that the Cubs rather think Micah Hoffpauir and/or Jake Fox could even be as good as Lee. Wow. I have no idea why they’d think that, given that Fox has a 1.336 OPS in AAA. So, while I don’t doubt the Cubbies wouldn’t mind moving Derrek Lee, he does have a no-trade clause, and I can’t see why we’d be in the picture. We could use a big bat, which Derrek Lee isn’t anymore, and we certainly wouldn’t want to give up much even if we did trade for him; certainly not Sanchez, I doubt Pucetas or Sosa, possibly someone on the level of Hinshaw and, I don’t know, Ben Copeland. More than that would be silly, I think, even if we wanted him, which we don’t, and if he waived his no-trade, which why would he? So he can hit a bunch of MF7s in China Basin?
And yet I have this nagging fear. . . .
Cain’s had his share of luck, to be sure, and the run support really helps. But I also see a guy who’s smarter and more mature. He seems to have more confidence in his fielders and is taking a page from the Maddux book, giving guys stuff to swing at and letting them make outs. I wonder if he has been building up to the 95-mph heat in order to stay stronger and fresher in the second half, as well as learning to get more outs with his off-speed stuff. Regardless, it’s working, that’s what matters!
Just say NO to Derek Lee.