UPDATE, 2:50 p.m.: One of my Twitter followers, Matt Saunders, sent along the photo at right and said, “Maybe the Giants should invest in a few of these.” I showed it to Matt Cain and he howled in laughter, saying, “That’s beautiful.”

Cain went on the disabled list today, retroactive to April 25, because he cut his right index finger in the kitchen before his scheduled start a week ago. He was all set to take his turn tonight until he tried throwing yesterday for the first time without a protective device on the finger. As he threw, the cut felt like it wanted to pop open, so the team decided discretion was the better part of valor here and decided to give him another five days.

Cain fully expects to start in Los Angeles on Saturday, a day after he is eligible to pitch again.

As you can imagine, Cain is getting a lot of grief for the knife accident, especially since we have been writing that he cut himself “trying” to make a sandwich, as if he could not complete that simple act.

Cain wants it known that he had finished the ham-and-cheese sandwich and grabbed the knife so he could cut it.

“I went to cut it, to make it fancy in triangles,” he said. When he dropped the knife he tried to catch it, and now he is on the DL for the second time in his career. The first time, last August, he was struck by a line drive.

“One of them was a freak accident and one of them was my own stupidity,” he said.

Cain does see one bright side to all this. As we report on the accident, people keep comparing him to Jeremy Affeldt, which means that Affeldt’s knife accident stays in the news.

In other pregame updates:

Manager Bruce Bochy said Brandon Belt’s slump contributed to tonight’s sans-a-Belt lineup, but Bochy also said he wanted to pair Yusmeiro Petit with Hector Sanchez again. Sanchez caught Petit’s six shutout innings last week. Sanchez, by the way, has a bad sore throat, so it wouldn’t shock me to see Buster Posey catch later in the game.

Bochy said the Giants picked Jake Dunning because he has been throwing multiple innings in Fresno, which makes him best-suited to replace Petit in the bullpen for the next several days.

Fresno beat Albuquerque 5-3 today for its ninth straight win. Today’s victory completed a four-game sweep of the Dodgers’ top farm club, on the road.

Brandon Crawford said he hit two homers in a game just once, in a Dominican instructional league intrasquad game in 2010. When I said I didn’t even know there was a Dominican instructional league, Crawford said, “I didn’t either, until they sent me there.” He homered off a pitching prospect named Edward Concepcion in his first two at-bats down there.

ORIGINAL POST: As we beat writers have learned over the years, the fans who complain and whine when a team is winning at a .645 clip are a very vocal minority. If someone didn’t watch the games or know the Giants’ record, but got all their opinions from Twitter and talk radio, you’d think the Giants were 11-20 and not the other way around.

So this blog is mainly for them. The rest of you have my blessing to pop over to Michael Bauer’s food blog. It’s really good.

For the rest of you, let me explain what is not going to happen in the near future.

The Giants are not going to send Pablo Sandoval to Fresno to relearn how to hit. He has too much service time to be demoted in the first place. In the second place, Sandoval has always hit when healthy, so the Giants are going to let him try to play his way out of his seasonlong slump, and if manager Bruce Bochy feels the need to start Joaquin Arias once in a while, he will.

The Giants are not going to send Brandon Belt to Fresno after a slump that’s less than two weeks old. Granted, it’s a big one. He has three hits and 17 strikeouts in his past 35 at-bats. But he is the Giants first baseman. He does not have Sandoval’s years or track record, and the Giants have options at first base, so Belt might sit a little more. In fact, he is sitting tonight against left-hander Jeff Locke.

The Giants are not going to promote second baseman Joe Panik and convert him to a third baseman, or promote Adam Duvall to take Sandoval’s job.

The Giants are not going to make a panic trade — it’s funny that I’m even using that term for a team with the third-best record in the majors — because of concern about Sandoval or Belt or anyone else on Cinco de Mayo.

So relax, Giants faithful, and try to enjoy a team that has won nine of its past 10 games and just swept three games in Atlanta for the first time since I had a lot of hair.

Now, I hope the silent majority is back from the Bauer blog, because you might be interested in this:

The Elias Sports Bureau came through and reported that the last team before the Giants to sweep a series of at least three games without a hit with runners in scoring position was the 1969 Padres, against the Astros. What makes this note fascinating is that San Diego’s 2-1, 2-0 and 2-0 victories came in the expansion franchise’s first three games.

Yes, the San Diego Padres began their life at 3-0. They went 49-110 the rest of the way in 1969.

Yusmeiro Petit starts in the opener against the Pirates for Matt Cain. Somehow, some sites had Jake Dunning starting the game. That is not so, although he is up from Fresno to take Petit’s spot in the bullpen.

Tonight’s lineup:

Pagan CF Pence RF Posey 1B Morse LF Sanchez C Sandoval 3B Hicks 2B Crawford SS Petit P

And for the Pirates….