Giving Thanks for Cain and Lincecum

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones!

This post originally was at El Lefty Malo, in a discussion on the merits of trading Tim Lincecum for David Wright (as if that was possible; a poster there suggested that). I've been thinking about this from different angles for a while so that post got me to get off my butt and finally put some of my thoughts together, putting together bits of info I've been collecting and writing about for the past few years now. Following is basically what I posted, but, yeah, I tweak:

Given the stats you provided, yes, it would seem to be a no-brainer, you go with David Wright.

I think the problem with this analysis is that it focuses mainly on winning during a season, not winning when you are in the playoffs.

I think we can all acknowledge that when you have a good pitcher, there are many games he can dominate and control, and with a great one, he can dominate a signficant percentage of his games.

I see your geek stat [Note: Lefty used WARP] and present The Baseball Forecaster's P.Q.S. (Pure Quality Starts) which takes the quality starts concept and updates it for the sabermetric era. For each start, a pitcher gets one point each for doing something that sabermetrically shows that he pitched well, whether it be pitching over 6 innings, giving up hits equal or less than IP, striking out within 2 of IP, striking out double or more walks given up, and giving up less than 2 HR.

Thus a start can range from 0 to 5, with a score of 4 or 5 denoting a dominating game. Then they calculate the percentage of starts a pitcher dominates.

Good pitchers dominate over 40% of their starts. Elite pitchers dominate 50-70% of their starts. The best dominate over 70% of their starts. Most pitchers are under 40%.

I've kept this stat the past two seasons on my blog for the Giants and Cain dominated 52% of his starts in 2006, 56% in 2007. However, Lincecum dominated 67% of his starts in his first season.

Now, I don't know the stat for players this season, but in 2006 the only pitchers over that were over 60% while starting most of the season were:

Chris Carpenter 66%
Roger Clemens 68%
Francisco Liriano 69%
Pedro Martinez 70%
Mike Mussina 75%
Brett Myers 65%
C.C. Sabathia 68%
Johan Santana 76%
Curt Schilling 71%
Ben Sheets 76%
John Smoltz 74%
Brandon Webb 64%
Carlos Zambrano 70%

Pretty exclusive company, eh?

So in his first season, he dominated the league as well as pitchers who took years to reach that level of dominance.

I won't even mention that he was even better once he got over his rough patch in his second month. Or that he should be even better next season as he figured things out: he had a 4.62 ERA in the first half of his season, 3.39 ERA in the second half. This is someone who had obvious deficiencies in his pitching repertoire in college, and worked at it until he developed his secondary pitches so that he could reduce his weaknesses. He's going to get better.

In a short series, when you have tough pitchers like Cain and Lincecum going at the other team, particularly when winning three games cinch the first round with them starting 3-4 of those games, that improves the odds greatly don't it?

Same with 7 game series, when they get to start 4 of the first 6 games.

Having a dominating pitcher helps things, but can you see that having two of them provides a tipping point where it greatly influences a team's chances of winning in a short series, particularly when you can set the rotation to begin with them?

And can you see how powerful it would be if one of our young pitchers come through in the next year or three and join the two of them in the rotation, how powerful THAT TRIO would be?

But having a David Wright does not do as much for us if the other team walks him all the time like they did Bonds. They can help neutralize his offense by pitching to our lesser players. And where will we pick up the protection for Wright in the lineup, trade Cain after trading Lincecum?

I think traditional sabermetrics ignores the significance of how much a pitcher can affect a game. It is really the only time in a baseball game when one player can dominate the other team simply by being good to great regularly. A home run every 10-20 AB is great but that's only 1-2 homer in a short series and you need more offense to win a game, let alone win a series. As we saw in 2002, you can have one of the best series in the history of the game like Barry did and we still lose. A pitcher can dominate a game, and when you have two or more of them, you can dominate series.

THAT is the future of the Giants, not trading off our unique situation for a great offensive talent. Sure, Lincecum can become injured, pitchers are more prone to that that position players. But you don't trade that off either, just because of that. We have a good situation here with Cain and Lincecum, I would rather see what happens with the two of them, then try my chances by trading one to get an offensive talent that I think would just be a band-aid on the offense, we need more than one great offensive player to win with an OK pitching staff, I think last season showed that. But if Cain and Lincecum can continue to develop, they can become great starting pitchers and we can have a great pitching staff, and we won't need that offensive player to win.

People forget that we don't need a great offense to win, we just need a good enough offense if the pitching is that good. And having a great offense didn't do much to help us in 2002 either, did it? And getting one good offensive player won't make our offense suddenly great either, even if we got David Wright through some miracle, our offense will still be sucky, we would still need to stick our fingers in the dam to stop the leaking.

We need to have a season take a bullet, we need to treat 2008 as a re-building year where we assess what we got and how much further we need to get. Getting a great offensive talent for Lincecum (or Cain) will not suddenly make us contenders, we are too far gone for that. We need to see what we got with Frandsen, Lewis, Schierholtz, Davis, Ortmeier, maybe others like Ishikawa, Bowker, Timpner.

Once we get a better sense of that, then we can think of a drastic thing like trading away a future Cy Young winner like Lincecum might be. Yes, his WARP is less than a top hitter like Wright, but in tandem with a pitcher like Cain, we can dominate short series. THAT is the key to future playoff success, not a shiny bauble like David Wright. If I recall right, the Mets had him and they didn't even make the playoffs either, and they have Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, and Carlos Delgado. Wright helps you win the battle that is the season, but Cain and Lincecum can help you win the war that is the playoffs.