I won't be the first to tell you this, and hopefully I'm not the last; but Matt Cain is underrated. Traditional stats, like his career 57-62 record, don't reflect his true talent level. And even advanced stats, like his career xFIP of 4.43, fail to show how truly good he is. For years, he has lived in the shadows. He was on a terrible baseball club for the first four years of his career, and by the time the Giants were good, he was known as the number two guy behind the ever-popular Tim Lincecum.
It's not as if his pitching goes completely unnoticed...he did, after all, get an all-star nod in 2009, and finished 12th in NL Cy Young voting this year. But then again, Bronson Arroyo also finished 12th. Anyway, Matt Cain manages to accomplish things and receive little attention for them.
Here are two standout examples:
1) Since 2010 was dubbed the "Year of the Pitcher", which pitching performances stand out in your mind? Oh, well there are the perfect games from Roy Halladay and Dallas Braden. And then the no-hitters from Edwin Jackson, Matt Garza, and Ubaldo Jimenez. Then there are the near no-hitters -- the Armando Galarraga game (we all know what happened there), the Travis Wood outing (in which he battled with Halladay, if I recall correctly), and the brilliant 17-strikeout performance from Brandon Morrow. So yeah, that about sums it up, right? No. ESPN offers us a handy tool, where they rank the top pitching performances based on game scores. And guess what? Matt Cain ranks number three for a May 28 outing against the Arizona Diamondbacks. In all of the highlight reels of great pitching outings this year, did you see this outing shown? I didn't. And when the brilliant TV sports analysts proclaimed this the "Year of the Pitcher", citing all of the great pitching performances of the year, was this ever mentioned? Nope.
2) Matt Cain pitched 22 consecutive scoreless innings in the postseason. I don't know how, on a national stage, he managed to receive such little attention for this, but it was shocking. He didn't battle Roy Halladay, or Cliff Lee. So he couldn't get credit for defeating these star pitchers. But what he did do: he denied his playoff opponents of a run. He didn't allow a single unearned run. Nevertheless, Tim Lincecum was awarded the postseason MVP, and Cody Ross was praised for his postseason performance. It's not as though nobody made mention of Cain's brilliance, but it certainly didn't receive its fair share of attention.
He's underrated because of inherit flaws in the system -- the system with which we evaluate baseball players. Win-loss records fail to reflect a pitcher's prowess, and xFIP -- a predictive stat -- is often flaunted as the be-all and end-all evaluation of a pitcher. And for what it's worth, he racks up innings -- he's an absolute horse -- providing a lot of extra value that goes unnoticed. Also, no-hitters are overrated...they are often largely dependent upon luck, and don't take into account an important factor -- BBs. A no-hitter isn't nearly as impressive if it comes with eight walks. Because of all of this, Cain is out of luck from both the traditional statistical point of view, as well as the ignorant sabermetrician's point of view. Hence his underratedness -- if that's even a word.
So anyway, I was surprised to see that he didn't crack Jayson Stark's All-Underrated Team. Not that I disagree with Stark's selections -- I actually liked his list a lot. But I was surprised nonetheless. It's a very subjective matter -- labeling a pitcher as "underrated". But I think we can all agree that Cain is underrated, no?
Also, I would be remiss if I didn't point you to another article that appeared here a few weeks ago, examining Matt Garza and Matt Cain. Here's part one and part two. It essentially proves a similar point, that Cain is better than his xFIP would suggest. Based on his rate stats and his xFIP, one could assume that he's no better than Garza. These articles however, written by Zachary Chiang, point out the flaw in that thinking.
