Matt Cain is my favorite Giant, hands down. He might be my favorite baseball player.

And when Matt Cain struggles, it makes me cry. This season is not going well for Matt Cain (and when I say not well for Matt Cain, I mean pretty good for most starters in MLB). In my idle time here at work, I thought I would do a little digging and see if I could see anything that might point at WHY he is struggling this season.

I noticed two things right away. The first, less glaring of the two is that his LD% is up. For the last three years, he has been pretty consistent right around 16-17%. This year, he is sitting right at 21%. Yikes! Also, those LD's have come at the expense of GB's. His flyball rate is actually in line if not up a little from last year. That LD % projects a BABIP of ~ .330. I guess he's been a little lucky to get the .279 that he is so far this year.

So he's turned ~ 3-5% of his GB's into LD's. That would be great if he were a batter.

Secondly, and more glaringly (and hopefully flukey?) is his HR rate. HR/9 is 1.37 (last year .63, career avg .84). Holy crap! He's nearly given up as many home runs so far this season as he did in the entirety of last season. His HR/FB rate is 11.1% (up from 5.5% last year). Take away just a few of the HR he has given up and his ERA and likely W-L looks a LOT better and we would all be sitting here takling about how he was doing fine and just like we expected him to.

So what gives? Part of me really thinks the HR issue is a fluke - that hes gotten unlucky on a few  flyballs and that has ended up costing him quite a few runs.

But I can't explain the LD issue. Part of me wants to beleive that Matt is using this season as extended spring training to try to become more of a pitcher and less of a thrower, but that might be wishful thinking. His pitch distrobution thusfar seems about the same, altho he has thrown the slider slightly less frequently (Ironically, as that has been considered his HR pitch). And his ratio of Balls/Strikes is pretty dead nuts solid through all three years (He is even throwing slightly more strikes this year). Thing is,  Players aren't hitting him any more often - it's just that when they do, it is harder.

So I guess I don't see any trend that really says "oh crap, Matt can't do X anymore -we should be worried" He is walking about one more batter per nine while striking out the same, but I have a hard time looking at that as causation for his fall from grace.

All I see is that he is giving up  more line drives and a LOT more home runs, and that is really screwing the pooch despite the "peripherials" being fairly consistent.

Your thoughts?