Saturday, May 22, 2010

No contest in the Coliseum II: Cained again

Gio Gonzalez is 24-years old and has fewer than 200 innings of major-league experience, but he bedeviled the Giants today, coaxing comebackers, pop-ups, and a host of other unimpressive outs over eight innings. It's not that the Giants aren't hitting, they also aren't making loud outs. The lineup produced TWO hits today. TWO! Grant at McChronic says it better than I can:
Nuts to your "magic inside." Giants baseball: dribbler, dribbler, pop-up, whiff, whiff, dribbler, fly out, dribbler, double, whiff, dribbler, whiff. It would look just swell on a t-shirt.
And that was in response to last night's game, where we actually got a double or two.

Not much more to say about Matt Cain, who's Game Score today was 73, his second best of the young season. Over nine starts the Tennessee Stud has thrown 59-1/3 IP and allowed 46 H, 3 HR, 22 BB, 42 SO and 21 R (19 ER). It's not dazzling stuff, but it is damn good, certainly better than most NL starters and worthy of a better won-loss record than 2-4. The lack of offensive support for no. 18 is frankly ridiculous! Come to think of it, none of our guys get the run support they deserve. According to FanGraphs, Cain was worth 1.0 WAR after his first 8 starts, so he's projected to be close to 4.0 WAR in a full season, which is consistent with his last four years as a full-time starter (3.5, 4.0, 3.7, 3.6). We have this wonderful, valuable cog in a world-class rotation, and the best we can do is 32 runs scored in his 9 starts (3.56 per game). If you take out the 10 runs scored in his first start, that's 22 runs scored in his next 8 starts, or 2.75 per game. Like I said yesterday, that ain't gonna cut it.

--M.C.

p.s I tapped my latest brew today, hoping to break the losing streak with Giants Fever. Alas, it was to no avail. The beer was good, the boys in grey were not.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the bright side to all of this losing, the Giants have tested my devotion to them. I've seen a hot Edgar Renteria, striped Zito, Cained Cain, and I've become a Romosexual. I've been through the good times (Pablo leading NL in BA, Giants in 1st place, etc.). I've been through the not so good times (right now for instance). But, there's much more season left to be played and the good part of hitting so poorly and the bullpen pitching not so nicely is that a change is gonna come (ala Sam Cooke or trade/minor league). Better luck next time. Go Giants!

Zo said...

MOC to Giants: "Shake it up and score for Cain, will ya?"

Giants to MOC: "No."

I don't quite know how to find the number of pitches each batter has in each at bat, but I'm guessing that Rowand and Molina each saw one pitch in each of their first three at bats. Seems Molina is tired of the patient hitting approach and has gone back to hacking.

Brother Bob said...

Classic Cain.
I'm so sick of the Giants making average pitchers look like superstars.
I'm so sick of being dominated by the As.
And I'm getting sick of all the bullshit Pablo Sandoval goes through before each plate appearance. The Panda Dance was cute when he was good, but for a .283 hitter with no power it's just bullshit. Just get in the fucking box.