I wish I had noticed this when I wrote about Cain's extension a month ago: his advanced stats reveal a pitcher who has consistently improved each season.
When trying to measure how good a pitcher actually is, Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) and Expected Fielding Independent Pitching (xFIP) are great stats to use because they only look at things pitchers have a significant amount of control over (like walks, strikeouts, and home runs).
Cain's FIP during his first four full seasons was pretty constant, never going above 3.96 but never going below 3.78. He was basically right at the league average. His FIP during his next two seasons, though, were 3.65 (in 2010) and 2.91 (in 2011). His 2.91 FIP last season was a huge improvement from his previous five seasons and was well above the league-average in that category.
However, Cain's career FIP isn't a good indicator of future improvement because his FIP numbers in his first five seasons were all about the same and didn't steadily improve. His xFIP, though, is an encouraging sign for Giants fans, and I wonder if the Giants' front office (as well as Cain's agent) looked at his career xFIP numbers when negotiating his contract extension. His xFIP improved in each of his six seasons, going from 4.59 (well below average) in 2006 to 3.78 (well above average) last season.
xFIP isn't the only stat one should use when trying to predict a pitcher's future and it is has it's fair share of flaws, but any pitcher who has steadily improved in that category for six straight seasons with a minimum of 190 innings each season (as is the case with Cain) is someone who is very likely to continue improving.
What can we expect from Cain this season? The stats point to Cain regressing a little from the hot start he's had so far because he's giving up a low Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP), but there are some factors to keep in mind.
First off, it's still early in the season, so it's hard to read too much into his stats since he's only started five games.
Secondly, his extremely low BABIP doesn't necessarily mean he's been lucky. His career BABIP of .262 is about .03 points lower than the league average, which is a pretty significant difference. Usually if someone's BABIP is that low, the pitcher is experiencing an unsustainable amount of luck, but since .262 is his career BABIP over six full seasons, it's hard to believe those results are solely because of luck. It's very likely that Cain has just been very good at limiting opposing hitters from hitting his pitches squarely.
In two straight starts against the Pirates and the Phillies, he pitched a combined 18 innings, with 3 hits, 0 ER, 1 BB, and 15 Ks. You'd have to be unspeakably lucky to do that without simply pitching lights-out.
I didn't watch either start, so I don't know for sure if he was getting very lucky, consistently causing the opposing lineup to hit soft balls in play, or a combination of both. He did pitch against two dreadful offenses, so you could attribute the low BABIP in those games both to Cain making good pitches that resulted in softly hit outs and to the Pirates' and Phillies' hitters not being good enough to hit his pitches sharply.
Cain's BABIP will almost certainly rise as the season goes on, but as long as it doesn't go too much above his career average and his FIP and xFIP stay above-average (currently 3.54 and 3.67, respectively), he should have a great year.
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