Henry Schulman SFGate/San Francisco Chronicle
Manager Bruce Bochy has called Matt Cain a "horse" more times than he could count by clomping his foot on the ground. But the horseshoe fits. For the fourth consecutive season, Cain has surpassed 200 innings. No Giant had done that in more than three decades.
So many of those innings have been money, too, like the seven he threw Wednesday night. Cain kept the Dodgers off the board in a 2-1 victory that moved the Giants a half-game behind San Diego for first place in the West. They trail Atlanta by the same margin for the wild card.
"Invaluable," Bochy said of Cain (12-10). "A guy like that is so strong. He's a horse (clomp!). He's one guy I don't get concerned with pitch counts. He's in incredible shape. He's religious with his workouts. Tonight, he had great stuff. He ended the game with the same stuff he started with. You're lucky to have a guy like that."
Indeed, the Giants have ridden this steed deep into contention. The Giants have won 10 of Cain's past 12 starts, and this one rated a 9.9 on the difficulty scale because of whom he beat.
Cain and Chad Billingsley were locked in a scoreless joust until the bottom of the seventh, when Mike Fontenot hit a two-out RBI single for the Giants' first earned run against Billingsley in 30 1/3 innings.
Aubrey Huff doubled against George Sherrill to open the eighth and scored from third by beating second baseman Ryan Theriot's throw on a Pablo Sandoval groundball.
That run proved valuable when Andre Ethier homered against Brian Wilson with two outs in the ninth. As a consolation prize, Wilson blew a 98 mph fastball past Jay Gibbons on a full count to seal his 43rd save.
After three 1-0 games out of their past four, the Giants' 26th one-run win looked like a slugfest. Hey, this is the NL West, and this is not Coors Field. The run-challenged Giants figure to play a lot of these down the stretch.
"You get used to it," Bochy said. "I think the players are. It's invaluable experience to play these tight games, when every pitch, every at-bat means so much. Sure, you'd like it the other way, but that's our style. It's that slogan - Giants baseball: torture. That's the way we do things."
Cain reached 200 innings when Rafael Furcal popped out in the third. He became the fifth San Francisco pitcher to do it at least four years in a row, the first since Jim Barr, who had a five-year run from 1973 to 1977.
"That's a goal we all want, 200 innings, and you want more than the year before," Cain said. "To do that, you've obviously got to stay in the game a long time and throw strikes."
Cain stayed in long enough to watch Travis Ishikawa bat for him in the seventh inning of a 0-0 game and rap a double to right center for his first hit since Aug. 18. Eugenio Velez, getting a tryout at leadoff, hit a soft comebacker for the second out before Fontenot hit a busted-bat single into short center field to get pinch-runner Emmanuel Burriss home.
This pennant-race stuff is new to a lot of Giants, particularly home-grown players such as Ishikawa who debuted long after the team's most recent postseason appearance in 2003.
"This is way better than anything I've ever experienced on a baseball field," Ishikawa said. "I noticed it from the first inning on. Every out we got, every run we scored, the fans were so into it. I hope we do this for another two months or so."
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