More on Cain and the Giants

Henry Schulman reported in the San Franisco Chronicle today that Matt Cain is only the fourth pitcher in San Francisco Giants’ history to win nine of his first 10 decisions in a season.

The other three are Tim Lincecum last year, Gaylord Perry and Juan Marichal. Two Hall of Famers and a young Cy Young winner: Cain couldn’t be in much better company than that.

If Cain really has turned a corner this year, it’s enough to give even as jaded a Giants’ fan as I am fantasies of the post season. The Giants are now in the lead for the National League Wild Card spot, a game up on St. Louis and 1.5 games ahead of the Mets.

I’ve been a Giants’ fan since 1978, so I have dealt with plenty of adversity. After the Gints blew Game Six of the 2002 World Series, I pretty much decided they would not win the World Series in my lifetime.

This is perhaps too pessimistic an outlook, although, rationally speaking, there is indeed a good chance the Giants will not win a World Series in my lifetime. Thinking so keeps me from getting my hopes up too much whenever the Giants are playing well.

Even so, now that the Giants are really playing well after four horrendous seasons, it’s hard to control the 10-year-old inside me, who wants to love the Giants unconditionally and dreams of post-season glory.

Cain and Lincecum would give the Giants the best one-two punch in the NL, and with Randy Johnson, Barry Zito (having his best season as a Giant so far) and the erratic but talented Jonathan Sanchez filling out the rotation, and a bullpen that’s solid from top to bottom, they’d likely have the best pitching in the league this year.

My rational side says the Giants still need to treat this as a rebuilding year, so they can put together a really good team that is contending for the post-season every year for a five or six season stretch. However, the temptation is great that if the Giants are still right in the middle of the Wild Card race come late July, they would be justified in trading young talent to try to win this year.

Baseball is a business, and businesses usually don’t look that far into the future. The point of a business is to be successful now and make profits now, rather than wait for years for some future event that might or might not ever come to pass.

Thus, the temptation for a major league team in the middle of a pennant race is to mortgage the future for a chance to win now. It’s a temptation difficult to resist.

This is especially true when you consider that any team that makes the post-season has at least a fighting chance of going all the way. Anything can happen in a short series.  Look at the 1987 Twins, the 1973 Mets (the weakest playoff team ever, who nonetheless fell a Game 7 short of winning the World Series) or the 2006 Cardinals.

It’s hard to see the 2009 Giants scoring enough runs to win three post-season series, but they certainly have the pitching to give them a possibility.

Well, it’s only mid-June, and we have time to wait to see what will develop. If the Giants are still within three games of the Wild Card spot in five or six weeks, that will be the time to make the decision to fish or cut bait.

In the meantime, it’s nice just to see the Giants playing winning baseball again.