The great Matt Cain debate flared anew after smoldering for just a few days when Dave Cameron of fangraphs.com posted a piece with data supporting the thesis that not only does Matt Cain have some control over his HR/FB, but a large contingent of Giants pitchers from over the last 10 years have apparently been able to control theirs too! While my main goal is to help others see the greatness in Matt Cain that I see, I have to say I feel just a bit of personal vindication as I have been saying that I think the Giants have an organizational pitching philosophy that suppresses HR's for a long time.
It has been virtually dogma in the sabermetric community that over a large enough sample size, all pitchers will have approximately the same HR/FB, therefore the more flyballs you allow, the more HR's you give up. While it is true that in general flyball pitchers give up a few more HR's than GB pitchers, they don't give up as many more as you would expect from a purely random distribution. I believe the reason for this is that most HR's don't come off good pitches and are not just random flyballs that happen to carry over the fence. In fact, most HR's are hit off "mistake" pitches like hanging sinkers, hanging breaking balls or fastballs down the middle of the strike zone. These mistake pitches get crushed. They are no doubters! I know when I am at a game, I can tell almost immediately if a ball is going out of the park. It just has a different trajectory than a deep flyball that gets caught at the warning track.
If you have a really good fastball, like Matt Cain, you really don't have to worry about it getting taken deep. You can keep on pounding it in there until the batter swings and misses, or hits a harmless flyball. Just my observations based on watching a whole lot of games on TV, including replays along with commentary from Kruk, most of Matt Cain's HR's are not given up off the high fastball which produces most of his flyouts. They come off breaking balls that he hangs in the strike zone and they really get pounded.
So, while Matt Cain keeps his HR/FB rate down by pounding the fastball up in the zone, those flyballs also keep his BABIP down because they are more sure outs than groundballs that might find their way between infielders. This is why, in addition to his low HR rates, he also has ridiculously low Batting Averages Against and why he is able to keep his ERA low despite the pedestrian K/9 and BB/9.
In addition to all of the great things Matt Cain does, there is also an organization wide tendency to low HR rates that goes beyond park factors. At the same time, the Giants have tended to have high BB rates over the same period of time. Putting it all together, I believe the Giants teach their pitchers to not "give in" to hitters even if that means walking a few more. When they have a runner or two on base and get behind the hitter, instead of coming in with a pitch in the middle of the strike zone they insist on making their pitch, keeping it on the corners where the hitters can't make solid contact. If the batter walks, hey, it's only a walk! They'll get the next batter!
I can't prove any of this other than to cite my extensive observation of Giants games and listening to Kruk's explanations of things, but it appears that as analysts are delving more and more into PitchFx data, some of these observations are being confirmed by hard data!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
To support your theory, Rob Neyer once analyzed on ESPN how Kirk Rueter and Nate Cornejo did it, walking a lot while not striking out too many, and what he found was that Rueter basically pitched more "bravely" if you will, but pounding the zone when there is nobody on base, which will result in the HR now and again, but not too many walks. But once there is a runner on base, he works the corners, limiting the chances of a homer, but because he's nibbling, he walks a heck of a lot more. But there are less hits and homers, and after that walk, you work on the next guy with the same strategy.
ReplyDeleteThe assumption of that article was that Rueter was the only one to do that, and a good one, but given your posts in recent days regarding this being a team-wide philosophy, it makes total sense now to me.
While most pitchers want to throw a certain pitch at a certain time, the catchers are in constant communication with the dugout and pitching coach and the catchers are the one who frames the target with their mitt, which now seems like something that Righetti is controlling from the dugout.
So maybe not a team-wide tendency, but one that Righetti and Gardner worked out together with Tidrow and Dobson (before he passed). That would explain how Righetti/Gardner has survived so many changes in the manager, most managers will usually want to bring in their guy as pitching coach.