{"id":346,"date":"2012-06-14T20:18:59","date_gmt":"2012-06-15T03:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=346"},"modified":"2012-06-14T20:18:59","modified_gmt":"2012-06-15T03:18:59","slug":"cain-is-able","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=346","title":{"rendered":"Cain is Able"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Naturals pitcher Matt Cain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s almost getting to the point where no hitters aren’t even worth discussing, and perfect games aren’t terribly rare either.\u00a0 But nonetheless, Natruals right hander Matt Cain pitched the 22nd perfect game in MLB history last night, arguably one of the most dominating pitching performances of all time.\u00a0 In addition to not allowing a base runner, Cain also struck out a career high 14 hitters during the Giants 10-0 victory over the Astros.\u00a0 The 14 strike outs matched Sandy Koufax for the most K’s in a perfect game.<\/p>\n

Using Bill James’ Game Score statistic, Cain’s outing was tied for the second best pitched game of all time, trailing only Kerry Wood’s 1 hit, 20 strike out game in 1998.\u00a0 By the way, Wood’s game was also against the Astros, but a lineup that featured a couple possible future Hall of Famers.\u00a0 The same cannot be said of the Astros lineup last night.\u00a0 But that should not diminish Cain’s accomplishment.<\/p>\n

While there have only been 22 perfect games in MLB history, five of them have occurred in the past four seasons, including two this year.\u00a0 Cain is the first DTBL player to do it this year tough since Phil Humber is not on the league roster.\u00a0 The last DTBL perfect game before last night belonged to Roy Halladay in May of 2010.<\/p>\n

The history of perfect games is quite fascinating.\u00a0 There had been a gap of 34 years without one before Don Larsen threw a perfect game in the 1956 World Series.\u00a0 Then there was another 13 year drought between 1968 and 1981.\u00a0 13 of the 22 have occurred in the past 32 years and nine since this league was formed in 1993.\u00a0 There have been a lot of theories as to why they have been so frequent in recent years.\u00a0 Some are fairly obvious:\u00a0 there are a lot more teams, and therefore more games played than there were in the first half of the 20th century.\u00a0 The end of the steroid era has led to better pitching numbers across the board in the last half dozen years or so.\u00a0 One theory I like is more about the increase in no hitters than perfect games:\u00a0 it could have a lot to do with the diminished focus on batting average as a significant stat.\u00a0 Strike outs are way up in the current era.\u00a0 It stands to reason that with fewer balls being put into play, fewer hits will fall in.\u00a0 But this is only a partial explanation since the MLB-wide batting average is not even close to historical lows.\u00a0 Whatever the reasons may be, perfect games are still extremely impressive achievements.<\/p>\n

With his outing last night, Cain moved into the DTBL lead in WHIP with a miniscule 0.853 mark.\u00a0 Although he’s not likely to keep it there all season, only two DTBL players have finished a full season with a lower WHIP.\u00a0 His 2.18 ERA, eight wins and 96 strike outs are all in the top three of the league as well.\u00a0 Cain has been a solid performer for the Naturals since 2007.\u00a0 His highest<\/em> ERA was a very respectable 3.57 in his DTBL rookie season (’07).\u00a0 Yet wins have been hard to come by, mostly due to the Giants anemic offense in recent years.\u00a0 Cain has never reached the 15 win mark, though he seems to be a pretty good bet to do it this year since he’s already more than half way there.\u00a0 He leads the Naturals in all pitching categories except for saves, so he deserves most of the credit for their league high 41 pitching points.\u00a0 The Naturals are currently in fourth place, but just eight points out of first.\u00a0 Their batting\/pitching numbers are almost reversed from last year when it was their hitting that led them to a second place finish.<\/p>\n

Cain was only one of several pitchers who put up extremely impressive numbers on Wednesday night.\u00a0 The Cardinals’ Lance Lynn matched Cain’s strike out total of 14, allowing three hits in 7+ scoreless innings.\u00a0 And R.A. Dickey nearly made it two no hitters in one night.\u00a0 He allowed just one infield hit in a complete game.\u00a0 The Mets are appealing<\/a> to try to get the scoring of the one hit changed to an error, but I would be absolutely shocked if the appeal is upheld.\u00a0 Dickey has been an amazing story all year.\u00a0 Last night, he broke the Mets team record for consecutive scoreless innings before allowing an unearned run in the ninth.\u00a0 But since the Moonshiners signed him as a free agent a few weeks ago, he is yet to allow an earned run in 25 1\/3 innings.\u00a0 He has won 10 games this year (three with the Moonshiners).<\/p>\n

Finally, following my last blog post a few weeks ago, there were a few comments about possible rule changes for next season.\u00a0 I decided to start a Forum thread to get a discussion going.\u00a0 If you haven’t read it yet, please check it out<\/a> and provide any feedback you may have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s almost getting to the point where no hitters aren’t even worth discussing, and perfect games aren’t terribly rare either.\u00a0 But nonetheless, Natruals right hander Matt Cain pitched the 22nd perfect game in MLB history last night, arguably one of the most dominating pitching performances of all time.\u00a0 In addition to not allowing a base […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moonshiners","category-naturals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}