When I heard Matt Cain signed a 6-year extension worth $112.5 million a few weeks ago, I didn’t blink. The total could have been $212.5 million and I wouldn’t have been perfectly happy with it. Cain might not be worth $112.5 million at the end of his deal when you look at the pure numbers. That’s a Verlander/Halladay level contract, and by every statistical measure, Cain isn’t on that level. But to me personally, Cain was going to be worth whatever it took to keep him in San Francisco.
He’s worth it to me, because every cent I’ve spent on the
Giants since 2005 can be traced back to watching him as a rookie and thinking
“This guy is going to be something special”
***
I grew up raised as a Giants & A’s fan in equal parts,
my father a die-hard A’s fan born and raised in Alameda, and my mother a Giants
fan through-and-through growing up in San Francisco. Throughout my adolescent
years I owned exactly two baseball jerseys: a Miguel Tejada A’s Jersey and a
Jason Schmidt Giants jersey. I was crushed when the god-forsaken rally monkey
defeated the Giants in 2002, and was similarly exasperated with the
close-but-no-cigar finishes of the Moneyball A’s. There was never any
favoritism toward one side or the other growing up. Wins and losses by each team affected me equally.
2005 was a fairly grizzly year in my baseball fandom. The
A’s were still competitive, but finished a distant 2nd in their
division and 7 games out of the playoffs. Add to the fact that 2 of my favorite
players from the moneyball A’s, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder, had been jettisoned
the previous offseason and I wasn’t terribly excited about Athletics baseball.
Meanwhile, across the bay, the house of cards built around Barry Bonds and his
magical flaxseed oil completely collapsed in 2005. Bonds only played 14 games in 2005 because of various injuries,
and the team predictably flailed for the entirety of the season, finishing
75-87, 16 games worse than the year before. My interest in baseball that summer
was waning.
Then, at some point early in that summer, I started hearing
about a young pitcher for the Giants that was making noise in the minors. They
said he was a big strong kid with an upper 90’s fastball, and he was only 20
years old. He was being hailed as a future star, and I was intrigued. He then
came up in August that year and looked like he would hold up his end of the
bargain, pitching like a stud in 7 starts. Fans really started to get their
hopes up that he might be legit. I was one of them.
***
2006 didn’t start off well for the prodigal son. He started off 1-5 through 7 seven starts
with an ERA north of 7, and was sent to the bullpen to get his mind cleared.
From May 10-20th he didn’t make a single start and only one bullpen
appearance in between. Then on May 21st, he was inserted back into
the starting rotation for a game against the Oakland Athletics. I just so happened to be attending that game
with my father for his birthday. Cain’s
first pitch of the game registered 97 on the radar gun, and prompted my dad to
ask in a slightly bewildered tone “Holy crap, who the hell is this guy?” As the game went on, my father and everyone
else in attendance got a healthy introduction to Matt Cain, the pitching phenom,
as he hurled a complete game one-hitter.
From that point on, I was absolutely hooked. Cain immediately became one of my favorite
big leaguers, and by proxy the Giants fortunes started to take on greater
importance to me. I wanted the team do
well, but mostly because I wanted Cain to do well. To this day I still root for
the A’s to do well and get frustrated by their troubles and enjoy when they
win, but those results didn’t just affect me the same way the Giants’ did.
***
As the years have passed since Cain’s ascension to the top
of the Giants pitching staff, defending him to the masses has been a favorite
pastime of Giants fans, myself included.
It seemed that despite his durability and consistency and elite ERA and
WHIP, many people not well versed in Giants baseball wanted to discredit his
achievements. Many old-school baseball writers looked at his unimpressive
Won-Loss record and deduced that Cain wasn’t a “winner” therefore his stats
were meaningless, not realizing that the Giants offense was particularly brutal
in his starts for many years, eventually giving berth to the saying “getting
Cained” whenever a Giants pitcher had a superb outing but was not rewarded with
any offensive support whatsoever.
Conversely, the advanced stat geeks wouldn’t accept Cain’s
work either. While they agree that W-L is a horrible way to judge a pitcher,
sabermetricians looked at Cain’s numbers and saw a flyball pitcher who
surprisingly gives up very few homeruns and thought he was just supremely
lucky. What they didn’t realize was
Cain’s biggest weapon is his fastball command, and the entire Giants staff
specializes in never giving into hitters and forcing them to hit their pitch,
no matter the count. That’s why the
whole giants staff walks a few more batters than the league average, but also
generates much weaker contact on the whole. By rarely giving batters easy
pitches, even in hitters counts, Cain’s reduced his homerun total while
remaining a fly ball pitcher. It wasn’t
luck, it was skill. People just needed
to see it in action instead of just looking at the numbers.
***
Cain’s complete game one-hitter yesterday was, for all
intents and purposes, the best start of his career. He was dominant from the
get go, with 11K’s and no walks, the only hit an opposite field slap-single by
the pitcher Jason McDonald. Cain was
special yesterday, and there is no way anyone could’ve seen the game or the
boxscore and think anything else, and because its Cain it means even more.
Cain has a special place in every Giant’s fan heart at this
point. Sure, the giants are now flush with homegrown talent all over the place,
but Cain was the first of this group.
Before Cain, it had been years since the Giants developed a true star,
so every fan’s hopes were riding on him to be the one that turned things around
from the dark days of the late-bonds/post-bonds era. We saw the 20 year-old rookie who wasn’t old enough to drink a
celebratory beer after his first career win. We saw the maturing Ace who was
learning to make his prodigious gifts work together and reach his full
potential. We saw the silent assassin
who refused to lose in the 2010 postseason, not allowing a single earned run
the entire playoffs on his way to a World Series ring. We saw the country kid from Germantown,
Tennessee sign the richest contract ever given to a right-handed pitcher, and
not have a single giants fan say one bad thing about the deal.
