Matt Cain Throws First Perfect Game In Giants History

Following a performance like Matt Cain’s on Wednesday night, the Internet fills up with things written about it. Many of them are good, many of them are bad, and many of them are in between. Many of them are written by people coming from the player’s team’s perspective. Many of them are written by people coming from an outside perspective. But things are still written by people coming from the other team’s perspective as well. In order for there to be a historic performance, there has to be an opponent against which the history is achieved.

Zachary Levine writes for the Houston Chronicle, and he was on hand at AT&T Park Wednesday to watch 27 Astros bat and 27 Astros make outs. He had to write about the game, because that’s his job, and one of the things he wrote is right here, on a site called Ultimate Astros. It is fantastic, and I will quote from it.

Matt Cain is a .500 pitcher.

Well, just a little better than .500.

For more on Cain’s perfect game, please visit McCovey Chronicles and SB Nation Bay Area.

Did you know that Giants pitcher Matt Cain has a name that’s convenient and versatile for purposes of wordplay? I bet you did not, but after Cain threw a perfect game against the Astros in San Francisco Wednesday night, headline editors seized the opportunity they’d been given. Below, a limited collection of results, culled from the Internet. I would’ve culled from newspapers, too, but none of them have arrived yet on my doorstep. Great sustainable business model in the 21st century, newspapers.

From ESPN:

Given two pitchers, one of whom is great and the other of whom is not great, obviously the great pitcher will have the better odds of throwing a perfect game. That is so obvious that I can’t believe I’m even typing this out.

Here’s the thing, though: baseball’s got a lot more not-great pitchers than it does great pitchers. So while you can try to predict who’s going to throw the next perfect game, most of the time you’re going to be wrong. Nobody would’ve predicted Philip Humber, even against the Mariners. Nobody would’ve predicted Dallas Braden. Plenty of people would’ve predicted Roy Halladay, but nobody, not nobody would’ve predicted Armando Galarraga, and I do count that one. Hell, Galarraga generated one more out than all the other guys.

PITCHERS RULE!

Seems like it this year, anyway.

Before the eighth inning, there were two exceptionally close calls.

If there’s a concern for Cain, it’s his pitch count, which stands at 103 after the seventh. Cain’s career high is 131, though, and Bruce Bochy isn’t shy about stretching Cain out a little bit.