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Tonight Vogelsong goes up against Dusty Baker's Reds. Bake was the Giants skipper when Vogelsong made it to the bigs for the first time in 2000 as a 22 year old. Bake's teams always seem to score lots of runs. It will be interesting 

"Voggy is not going anywhere," Bochy said. "He's going to pitch every fifth day. We might have to get a little creative here. We're just starting to talk about it now." "It was a long road for him but he never gave up," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. "He kept grinding to get back to the major leagues. That's one of the best stories I've seen since I've been in the game."

Thus spake Bruce Bochy. Tough to argue with Vogelsong's line this year. Its the best of the best on the Giants staff.

	GP	GS	CG	SHO	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	SO	W	L	SV	HLD	BLSV	WHIP	ERA
2011 Regular Season	10	8	1	1	53.2	42	11	10	3	14	42	4	1	0	0	0	1.04	1.68

The worriers and skeptics are prone to point to his low strikeout to innings ratio coupled with prior seasons. Let me take on the second concern first: I think he is a guy who has always had good stuff, and lousy command and got stuck playing on a bunch of lousy teams. Now he has command, the same stuff, the right opportunity with the right team in the right stadium and a bunch of other things that have gone right for him.

Like we are wont to say when guys careers fall off a cliff; it's never one thing. And we can use that same line here with Vogelsong (like Torres last year--an older player having a breakout year) Its probably not just one thing, but rather a number of little things that have conflated together to enable our guy here to have what so far, has been the best season of his life. It happens.

The first thing is a little more complex; his lack of strikeouts per inning (though his k/bb ratio is an excellent 3.00) For comparison, Lincecum is 3.66, Cain is 2.625, Sanchez is 1.8, Bumgarner is 2.26. Zito by contrast is .75 in his few innings before hitting the d/l.  So aside from Lincecum, he has the best k/bb ratio for starters on the team. And this is what the pre-eminent baseball thinker and statistician Bill James has to say about this misconception that more strikeouts per inning is better than fewer strikeouts per inning:

"3) We know this because, when you take a group of pitchers with a given rate of Strikeouts Minus Walks and split that group into high strikeout/high walk pitchers and low strikeout/low walk pitchers, the low strikeout/low walk pitchers are clearly and significantly better. 

Now he lays out all the data over at his billjamesonline.net website which is linked here. But its basically a mathematical expression of what coaches and baseball folks have known for a long time; give us a guy with a good k/bb ratio and a lower k/9 total and we'll give you a more consistent starting staff, defense, reduced pitch counts and everything positive that goes along with getting guys back into the dugout faster than the guys who are burning up their pitchcounts with a lot of 6 pitch at bats instead of 2 or 3 pitch at bats.

In the meantime, though Vogelsong's epic bounce back has been overshadowed by the plethora of disasters to strike the Giants in the injury department this season, he is one of the primary causes of them not residing in the bottom tier of the NL West but rather after today's mastery in the gloom of Colorado at ATT, back in first place, 5.5 games in front of their nemesis. 

And that's good news for Giants fans everywhere.