BABIP – look it up.

Thanks.

Great comments here on this topic. A few thoughts of my own.

First, Matt Cain’s amazing success thus far this season while pitching from the stretch will almost certainly decline over the rest of the season, with his ERA going in the opposite direction.

Second, perhaps the most exciting factor in Matt’s recent outings is that he hasn’t yielded a homer in his last four games and has yielded only one in his past six outings after giving up five homers in his first five games.

In three of those five outings, Matt actually induced more ground balls than fly balls, which is unusual for him. But last night he yielded 7 fly balls to only 2 grounders. And his line drive rate was high. An increase in his home run rate could be coming.

On the positive side, Matt equalled his season high in strikeouts with 7 — in only five innings. Matt has also walked only four batters in his last three games and 10 in his last five outings.

Regarding the stretch, I think if a pitcher is struggling with his control, it can be a good thing to switch up by going to the stretch. Pitchers don’t seem to do so very often, but Tim Lincecum has indeed done so on at least two occasions.

Getting that first pitch in for a strike is BIG. As was mentioned, it is hard to look for the curve on the first pitch, so if a pitcher can get it over, he’s ahead of the game as well as in the count.

By the way, for all the other things Tim Lincecum has been doing well, getting that first pitch over hasn’t been one of them. Tim has declined from 59.1% to 57.5% to 55.9% over his first three seasons.

And it isn’t as if hitters are killing Tim when he get his first pitch in. He’s getting up close to 2000 first pitches now, and only 8 of them (2 this season) have been hit for extra bases. I"m thinking Bengie should be calling for more first-pitch fastballs. After Tim has gotten batters 0-1, they are managing only a meager .439 OPS against him. When he has gotten behind, their OPS is .790. When they have put his first pitch into play (which they have done only 30 times this season), their OPS is .770.

Tim is throwing far more secondary pitches this season, with his fastball percentage having dropped down to 58% from about 67% in his first two seasons. I think that is the primary reason his strikeout rate is up — and helps account for how well he has pitched after getting ahead in the count.

By the way, a stat that is sure to shock you: 100%, yes 100% ,of Tim’s strikeouts have come after two strikes.

Baseball Prospectus did a piece a couple days ago that made some very interesting observations about how Cain was generating more movement on his pitches with runners on, helping him to get out of tough spots. This might be the statistical smoking gun that supports the claim that Cain “bucks up” with runners on — but it’s possible that it’s just another sample-size mirage.

I think an important thing to remember about pitching from the stretch, though, is that it’s supposedly more taxing on a pitcher because it requires more of the energy in a pitcher’s mechanics to be generated by fewer moving parts (specifically the arm). I say “supposedly” because I’ve never seen any statistical evidence to support this — I’m not aware of any sort of precipitous loss in velocity from the stretch vis-a-vis the windup. But that is what Krukow and other pitchers have said, so it has to be considered.

I say we hold off on any sort of dramatic “always pitch from the stretch” suggestions until Cain’s numbers have a chance to regress a bit — it’s true that his splits are dramatic, but it’s important to notice that he’s been almost exactly as (over)effective from the stretch as he has been (under)effective out of the windup. In other words, his numbers from the windup have deviated from his career bases-empty stats by a margin remarkably similar to the margin between his 2009 numbers from the stretch and his career numbers in the same context. We should expect regression to more sustainable levels in his numbers from the stretch, but we should also expect to see some reverse-regression (progression?) in his numbers from the windup. Does that make sense?