**2010-2011 SF Giants off season thread**
- Thread starter DUTCH-F.E
- Start date
I say send Zito to AA or AAA. I could careless how much he's making. If he didnt have that contract, he would've been cut in his first season with the season. Why is money an excuse to keep an underperforming player on the team? We have to pay him no matter what, so why not jus put him in the minors....
As long as he is a member of the starting rotation, he is hurting the team.
As long as he is a member of the starting rotation, he is hurting the team.
I've seen it before bud, but thanks though. I'm not talking shit about the Giants at all, I'm just saying to obsess over another man's facial hair is......gay. But whatever, like I said I still think Tejada was a great pick up for the Giants. Dude can still hit and I'm gonna miss the way he played the game.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/little-big-man/
Tim Lincecum, the diminutive power pitcher known variously as Seabiscuit, Tiny Tim and, most memorably, the Freak, slid behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes-Benz on a recent afternoon, sipping a Red Bull. His hair, which he hadn’t cut since leading the San Francisco Giants to their first World Series in more than 50 years — and didn’t intend to cut anytime soon unless his manager, Bruce Bochy, ordered otherwise — was pulled back into a ponytail. A mustache, if the underseeded patch of grass beneath his nose could be called that, had sprouted up during the off-season, giving him the aspect of a teenager trying to avoid getting carded.
“That desk manager is really sexy,” Lincecum’s agent, Rick Thurman, who had flown up from Los Angeles for the day, volunteered from the back seat as we emerged from the basement garage of Lincecum’s apartment building, a 30-story glass tower in downtown Seattle.
“The one with short, black hair?” Lincecum asked. “Yeah, she’s good-looking, but she posted on Twitter that she saw me walking around in my boxers. That kind of pissed me off.”
Lincecum powered up his iPod and started singing along in full-throated falsetto to a cheesy electro-pop song, the Far East Movement’s “Rocketeer,” nailing every lyric — “Up, up here we go/Where we stop nobody knows” — as he weaved through traffic.
It has been said that baseball is a boy’s game played by men. Whoever coined this phrase had obviously not seen Tim Lincecum grinning goofily in the dugout between innings. Most starting pitchers hew to strict pregame routines. Meals are carefully chosen and timed. Fifteen minutes before one of his first big-league starts, Lincecum was spotted tucking into a Philly cheese steak on the clubhouse couch in his underpants and shower shoes. Lincecum also doesn’t draw the customary invisible force field around his locker. “Most pitchers on game days are like, ‘Leave me alone, let me do my thing,’ but I’m like, ‘Guys, you can talk to me, we can listen to music,’ ” he told me earlier in his apartment. “I mean, it’s supposed to be fun, right?”
Physically, Lincecum is the opposite of the modern pitcher — the 6-foot-4 Roger Clemens, say, or the 6-foot-6 Roy Halladay, big, broad-shouldered men with tree-trunk legs and “Baby Got Back” posteriors. (The gluteus maximus is one of a pitcher’s most important muscles.) Lincecum is 5-foot-11, in spikes, and runaway skinny. Even before the arrival of steroids, we had drifted far from the days when the size of baseball’s professional practitioners made them unique among the behemoths of the N.F.L. and N.B.A. Watching Lincecum on the mound, we can once again indulge the fantasy: Hey, that could be me out there, if only I could throw a baseball close to 100 miles an hour and spin it so that it dives and darts like a tropical mosquito.
Of course, it is just fantasy. Lincecum may look ordinary, but consider a few tales of his athletic prowess: His junior year in high school, he went out for the golf team, having played three rounds of golf in his life. Needing to shoot under 40 for nine holes, he carded a 39. (One of Lincecum’s former baseball coaches told me that he once saw him drive a golf ball 315 yards, in sandals.) He can do a standing back flip and walk on his hands. (Some sneaker tread marks on his living room wall attest to his ability to do vertical push-ups, too.) He can throw a baseball more than 400 feet on the fly, far enough to clear the outfield wall from the batter’s box in any big-league park. Admittedly, these feats don’t necessarily conform with our prevailing notion of “athleticism,” which has essentially come to mean strong and fast. But that’s the point: Lincecum has redefined and even reclaimed the term. He’s a pure athlete in the classic, schoolyard sense.
Last year, as he pitched the Giants to their World Series victory, Lincecum became the city’s most beloved sports icon in a generation. He was the perfect hero for San Francisco, a precious town that clings smugly to its countercultural history and saw in this stringy-haired, F-bomb-dropping, convention-flouting pitcher an athlete made in its image. He was the antithesis of the aloof, comic-book-size Barry Bonds. A marijuana bust, which produced a requisite apology and plenty of amusing T-shirts — “Blaze One for Lincecum” — only enhanced his local legend.
But before the happy ending there was hardship, even something approaching despair, both for the Giants, who were nearly seven games behind the San Diego Padres with just over a month to go in the season, and for Lincecum. It’s all relative when you’re 26 and getting paid $13 million to throw a baseball every fifth day, but 2010 was a tough year for the Giants ace. He struggled on and off before enduring an August so execrable that some scouts were predicting he was destined for the bullpen, the rough equivalent of being put out to pasture for a starting pitcher. Even Lincecum, who like most star athletes is largely unencumbered by introspection and self-doubt, was beginning to wonder. “I’d never lost five games in a month, not at any level,” he told me. “I started questioning my own self and what got me here.”
Having spent the previous two off-seasons with his ex-girlfriend in San Francisco, Lincecum put down roots in Seattle after the 2010 World Series, buying a 2,400-square-foot, $1.575 million condominium. When we met there on an afternoon in late January, the fog had lifted for the first time in days. The glass-walled apartment, which is on the 28th floor, offered panoramic views of the snow-capped Cascade and Olympic Mountains.
Spring training was less than a week away, and Lincecum had been stepping up his workouts. That morning, he had played long toss and run football routes — his latest answer to the tedium of jogging on a track or treadmill — with a teammate from the University of Washington, Kyle Parker, a once highly touted prospect himself who recently dropped out of the Mariners minor-league system.
When I arrived, Lincecum was sitting at his kitchen counter in black sweats and a backward Giants cap, finishing up his lunch, a pizza bagel and potato chips from Noah’s Bagels, one of a handful of takeout spots that provide him with nearly all of his meals. (Sometimes he’ll order two subs from a nearby sandwich shop and stash one in his refrigerator for later.) Lincecum gave me a tour of his place, a version of the man cave: the dude aerie. There were four flat-screen TVs, a guest room that his childhood buddy Drew was squatting in, a pool table, a Red Bull cooler and a “FIFA room,” reserved exclusively for video games. We were trailed by Lincecum’s French bulldog, Cy, named after the Cy Young Award. His other dog, a puppy named Kayo, who wasn’t yet housebroken, had been relegated to the guest-room bathtub.
Lincecum’s father, Chris, who shares his youngest son’s unprepossessing build, was sitting at the dining table with Lincecum’s agent. In front of them was a box of baseballs awaiting Lincecum’s autograph and a stack of the latest issue of GQ, “The 25 Coolest Athletes of All Time.” Lincecum was among them, along with another pitcher, the famously ferocious Bob Gibson, who retired nine years before Lincecum was born. “Was Bob Gibson cool?” he asked innocently. “Or was he just a . . .” — and here Lincecum used a colloquialism that’s synonymous with a part of the male anatomy that is unprintable in this magazine.
Lincecum and I talked on the windowsill of his unfurnished bedroom His dad, who recently retired after 42 years as a supply manager at Boeing, would occasionally appear on the wraparound deck smoking a cigarette. At one point, he bent over to scoop up dog poop. (“Thanks, Dad,” Lincecum called sheepishly from inside.)
Lincecum grew up 20 minutes from downtown Seattle in the middle-class suburb of Renton, Wash. He comes from a long line of physical and athletically gifted men. His grandfather, a part-time logger, could walk up and down stairs on his hands and fistfought as a hobby. Lincecum’s father pitched in junior college and tutored Tim and his older brother, Sean, in the backyard. Sean broke his arm in high school, but Chris kept at it with “Timmy,” developing a weight-training program for him that stressed increasing elasticity and strength without adding bulk and devising a series of gestures and accompanying phrases to yell out from the stands during games: “Pick up the dollar” was a reminder to follow through. “Dangle” meant to keep his throwing arm loose against his side before going into his windup. After most outings, they would watch video of his performance and study his mechanics.
Lincecum’s delivery is a marvel of kinesiology: not for nothing is his nickname “the Freak.” To understand how he is able to generate so much power from such a small frame, think of his body as a huge rubber band. Each sequential part of his motion — from the rocking back at the start to the long, low stride at the end — is intended to stretch out his various muscles, the force behind them slowly building until his arm whips through at release: snap!
There are echoes of other pitching greats in Lincecum’s delivery, but his father directed the design and assembly of its component parts and is fiercely possessive of it. When I mentioned to him later in the afternoon that Lincecum’s college coach, Ken Knutson, had taken a measure of credit for Lincecum’s success — that, in Knutson’s formulation, Lincecum’s father had taught him how to throw, but he had taught him how to pitch — Lincecum’s dad was dubious. “Timmy likes Ken, and Ken was really good to Timmy,” he said. “But he promised me he wouldn’t mess with him, and he didn’t. And why would he? Timmy was the best thing he’d ever seen.”
Lincecum’s talent was apparent early, but his size was an issue. His freshman year in high school, he was still just 4-foot-11 and 85 pounds; a year later, he was 5-foot-3 and barely 100. “Before the season started, it was always a question of: Am I still going to be able to hang with these guys?” Lincecum said. “People were maturing, and I was still prepubescent.” When an old teammate of Knutson’s who had coached Lincecum in a summer league brought him by a University of Washington practice, Knutson wasn’t sure what to think: “I was, like: for real, you think this puny kid is going to be good enough to pitch in the Pac-10?” Lincecum finally hit a growth spurt his junior year, shooting up to 5-foot-8, 130 pounds. His fastball jumped from the low 80s to the high 80s. And with the added speed came more movement.
In college, Lincecum was named Pac-10 pitcher of the year as a freshman. He entered the Major League Baseball draft after his sophomore season. The Cleveland Indians selected him with the 1,261st pick. Thurman, his agent, asked for a $1 million signing bonus; the Indians refused to go above $400,000. Lincecum went back to school for another year, winning the 2006 Golden Spikes Award, baseball’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy. Because of his size and unorthodox mechanics, he was still available when the Giants made their first-round pick that summer. He was the 10th player chosen.
Lincecum began the 2007 season in the minors but was called up in a matter of weeks after several utterly dominant starts with the Giants’ Class AAA affiliate in Fresno, Calif. He won the Cy Young Award in 2008 and 2009, his first two full years in the major leagues, and looked every bit as unhittable at the opening of the 2010 season.
At least initially, Lincecum’s problems were easily overlooked. A rough outing here and there was simply attributed to bad luck or a bad day: that’s just baseball. By the middle of August, though, when Lincecum suffered his third defeat in a row, it was evident that he was no longer himself. “He was losing for the first time in his life, and he was doing it on a national stage,” the Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti told me later.
There was no shortage of speculation about the cause. Lincecum’s fastball, which was clocked at 100 miles per hour in his big-league debut, had lost some velocity. Was he out of shape? Was Lincecum not laid-back but lazy? The fatalists were sure that it was arm trouble, that Lincecum’s unusual delivery had finally caught up with him.
For his part, Lincecum hadn’t felt right for much of the season, or at least not consistently right. He had become hypersensitive to the idiosyncrasies of the National League’s various mounds, complaining repeatedly to Righetti that he was having trouble getting comfortable during games. As one disappointing outing led to another, Lincecum searched impatiently for a solution. He was grasping, trying everything to turn himself around, from wearing his socks higher to changing his delivery, which he had not tinkered with since he was 8. “With Timmy, unlike most people, because of the bar he sets for himself, there had to be an answer,” Righetti said.
Lincecum had made a career of proving doubters wrong, but now that he was expected to shut down every team he faced, he felt a different kind of pressure to perform. “The fact that people were like, ‘Is he ever going to be the same Tim Lincecum?’ or whatever the hell they were saying — it all crept up into my head,” he told me. “I started thinking about every aspect of my delivery as opposed to just doing it and trusting it.”
Ultimately, it took a combination of factors to pull Lincecum out of his funk. He started running stadium steps to strengthen his leg muscles, the key to a pitcher’s power, and began using his slider a lot more. He also drew inspiration from an emotional pep talk that the Giants general manager, Brian Sabean, gave to the team’s pitching staff in late August, urging them not to give up in spite of the Padres’ seemingly insurmountable lead.
Most of all, Lincecum had to come to terms with the fact that every pitcher struggles. All he could do was to try to relax and find his way through it. “It’s about accepting it,” he says. “That’s hard to tell people, just because they’re like, ‘What the hell? He’s accepting that he sucks?’ No, it’s like, ‘I can’t do anything about the past. I’m going to get better from here, stop trying to reinvent myself, trust my stuff and move on.’ ”
Hair by Dennis Lanni at Art Department for Redken
After Lincecum and I had talked for a little while, I unpacked my laptop and put in a DVD of the fifth and final game of the 2010 World Series. Lincecum’s grim August had been followed by a glorious September. The Giants beat the Padres to win the division on the final day of the season and defeated the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies in the playoffs.
To my surprise, this was the first time that Lincecum, who spent the better part of the off-season watching TV and playing video games, had seen any of the World Series. We went straight to the seventh inning, the turning point of the game. Lincecum and the Texas Rangers’ ace, Cliff Lee, had matched zeros for six innings, but in the top of the seventh, the Giants went ahead 3-0 on a three-run home run by Edgar Renteria. (“Boom!” Lincecum said, watching Renteria’s bat meet the ball. “That was so awesome, so awesome.”
It was up to Lincecum to protect the lead.
“Right there I threw him a changeup. I was like, ‘Make sure you keep this down,’ because I knew he was going to want to chase,” he said as we watched the Rangers’ Vladimir Guerrero chop futilely at a ball in the dirt for the first out.
Lincecum doesn’t watch a lot of pregame film, as many pitchers do, to look for vulnerabilities in the hitters he’s about to face. “I stick to my strengths as opposed to going after everyone’s weaknesses,” he told me. “If you can hit it, come hit it.”
The next batter, Nelson Cruz, did just that, sending the ball over the left-field wall. Lincecum then walked Ian Kinsler, bringing the tying run to the plate. It looked like Lincecum could easily unravel. I thought of him just two months earlier, dealing for the first time with self-doubt, questioning things that for so long had been second nature. But he was clearly back to his old self now. “You’ve done this a million times,” he said when I asked him what he was thinking as the next hitter came to the plate. “This is just another game. Pitch your game.”
Back-to-back strikeouts later, Lincecum had killed Texas’s rally and was walking coolly back to the dugout. The Fox camera panned to a displeased-looking Nolan Ryan, an owner of the Rangers and a pitching legend himself whose records Lincecum may one day surpass. “Sorry, Nolan,” Lincecum said.
Tim Lincecum, the diminutive power pitcher known variously as Seabiscuit, Tiny Tim and, most memorably, the Freak, slid behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes-Benz on a recent afternoon, sipping a Red Bull. His hair, which he hadn’t cut since leading the San Francisco Giants to their first World Series in more than 50 years — and didn’t intend to cut anytime soon unless his manager, Bruce Bochy, ordered otherwise — was pulled back into a ponytail. A mustache, if the underseeded patch of grass beneath his nose could be called that, had sprouted up during the off-season, giving him the aspect of a teenager trying to avoid getting carded.
“That desk manager is really sexy,” Lincecum’s agent, Rick Thurman, who had flown up from Los Angeles for the day, volunteered from the back seat as we emerged from the basement garage of Lincecum’s apartment building, a 30-story glass tower in downtown Seattle.
“The one with short, black hair?” Lincecum asked. “Yeah, she’s good-looking, but she posted on Twitter that she saw me walking around in my boxers. That kind of pissed me off.”
Lincecum powered up his iPod and started singing along in full-throated falsetto to a cheesy electro-pop song, the Far East Movement’s “Rocketeer,” nailing every lyric — “Up, up here we go/Where we stop nobody knows” — as he weaved through traffic.
It has been said that baseball is a boy’s game played by men. Whoever coined this phrase had obviously not seen Tim Lincecum grinning goofily in the dugout between innings. Most starting pitchers hew to strict pregame routines. Meals are carefully chosen and timed. Fifteen minutes before one of his first big-league starts, Lincecum was spotted tucking into a Philly cheese steak on the clubhouse couch in his underpants and shower shoes. Lincecum also doesn’t draw the customary invisible force field around his locker. “Most pitchers on game days are like, ‘Leave me alone, let me do my thing,’ but I’m like, ‘Guys, you can talk to me, we can listen to music,’ ” he told me earlier in his apartment. “I mean, it’s supposed to be fun, right?”
Physically, Lincecum is the opposite of the modern pitcher — the 6-foot-4 Roger Clemens, say, or the 6-foot-6 Roy Halladay, big, broad-shouldered men with tree-trunk legs and “Baby Got Back” posteriors. (The gluteus maximus is one of a pitcher’s most important muscles.) Lincecum is 5-foot-11, in spikes, and runaway skinny. Even before the arrival of steroids, we had drifted far from the days when the size of baseball’s professional practitioners made them unique among the behemoths of the N.F.L. and N.B.A. Watching Lincecum on the mound, we can once again indulge the fantasy: Hey, that could be me out there, if only I could throw a baseball close to 100 miles an hour and spin it so that it dives and darts like a tropical mosquito.
Of course, it is just fantasy. Lincecum may look ordinary, but consider a few tales of his athletic prowess: His junior year in high school, he went out for the golf team, having played three rounds of golf in his life. Needing to shoot under 40 for nine holes, he carded a 39. (One of Lincecum’s former baseball coaches told me that he once saw him drive a golf ball 315 yards, in sandals.) He can do a standing back flip and walk on his hands. (Some sneaker tread marks on his living room wall attest to his ability to do vertical push-ups, too.) He can throw a baseball more than 400 feet on the fly, far enough to clear the outfield wall from the batter’s box in any big-league park. Admittedly, these feats don’t necessarily conform with our prevailing notion of “athleticism,” which has essentially come to mean strong and fast. But that’s the point: Lincecum has redefined and even reclaimed the term. He’s a pure athlete in the classic, schoolyard sense.
Last year, as he pitched the Giants to their World Series victory, Lincecum became the city’s most beloved sports icon in a generation. He was the perfect hero for San Francisco, a precious town that clings smugly to its countercultural history and saw in this stringy-haired, F-bomb-dropping, convention-flouting pitcher an athlete made in its image. He was the antithesis of the aloof, comic-book-size Barry Bonds. A marijuana bust, which produced a requisite apology and plenty of amusing T-shirts — “Blaze One for Lincecum” — only enhanced his local legend.
But before the happy ending there was hardship, even something approaching despair, both for the Giants, who were nearly seven games behind the San Diego Padres with just over a month to go in the season, and for Lincecum. It’s all relative when you’re 26 and getting paid $13 million to throw a baseball every fifth day, but 2010 was a tough year for the Giants ace. He struggled on and off before enduring an August so execrable that some scouts were predicting he was destined for the bullpen, the rough equivalent of being put out to pasture for a starting pitcher. Even Lincecum, who like most star athletes is largely unencumbered by introspection and self-doubt, was beginning to wonder. “I’d never lost five games in a month, not at any level,” he told me. “I started questioning my own self and what got me here.”
Having spent the previous two off-seasons with his ex-girlfriend in San Francisco, Lincecum put down roots in Seattle after the 2010 World Series, buying a 2,400-square-foot, $1.575 million condominium. When we met there on an afternoon in late January, the fog had lifted for the first time in days. The glass-walled apartment, which is on the 28th floor, offered panoramic views of the snow-capped Cascade and Olympic Mountains.
Spring training was less than a week away, and Lincecum had been stepping up his workouts. That morning, he had played long toss and run football routes — his latest answer to the tedium of jogging on a track or treadmill — with a teammate from the University of Washington, Kyle Parker, a once highly touted prospect himself who recently dropped out of the Mariners minor-league system.
When I arrived, Lincecum was sitting at his kitchen counter in black sweats and a backward Giants cap, finishing up his lunch, a pizza bagel and potato chips from Noah’s Bagels, one of a handful of takeout spots that provide him with nearly all of his meals. (Sometimes he’ll order two subs from a nearby sandwich shop and stash one in his refrigerator for later.) Lincecum gave me a tour of his place, a version of the man cave: the dude aerie. There were four flat-screen TVs, a guest room that his childhood buddy Drew was squatting in, a pool table, a Red Bull cooler and a “FIFA room,” reserved exclusively for video games. We were trailed by Lincecum’s French bulldog, Cy, named after the Cy Young Award. His other dog, a puppy named Kayo, who wasn’t yet housebroken, had been relegated to the guest-room bathtub.
Lincecum’s father, Chris, who shares his youngest son’s unprepossessing build, was sitting at the dining table with Lincecum’s agent. In front of them was a box of baseballs awaiting Lincecum’s autograph and a stack of the latest issue of GQ, “The 25 Coolest Athletes of All Time.” Lincecum was among them, along with another pitcher, the famously ferocious Bob Gibson, who retired nine years before Lincecum was born. “Was Bob Gibson cool?” he asked innocently. “Or was he just a . . .” — and here Lincecum used a colloquialism that’s synonymous with a part of the male anatomy that is unprintable in this magazine.
Lincecum and I talked on the windowsill of his unfurnished bedroom His dad, who recently retired after 42 years as a supply manager at Boeing, would occasionally appear on the wraparound deck smoking a cigarette. At one point, he bent over to scoop up dog poop. (“Thanks, Dad,” Lincecum called sheepishly from inside.)
Lincecum grew up 20 minutes from downtown Seattle in the middle-class suburb of Renton, Wash. He comes from a long line of physical and athletically gifted men. His grandfather, a part-time logger, could walk up and down stairs on his hands and fistfought as a hobby. Lincecum’s father pitched in junior college and tutored Tim and his older brother, Sean, in the backyard. Sean broke his arm in high school, but Chris kept at it with “Timmy,” developing a weight-training program for him that stressed increasing elasticity and strength without adding bulk and devising a series of gestures and accompanying phrases to yell out from the stands during games: “Pick up the dollar” was a reminder to follow through. “Dangle” meant to keep his throwing arm loose against his side before going into his windup. After most outings, they would watch video of his performance and study his mechanics.
Lincecum’s delivery is a marvel of kinesiology: not for nothing is his nickname “the Freak.” To understand how he is able to generate so much power from such a small frame, think of his body as a huge rubber band. Each sequential part of his motion — from the rocking back at the start to the long, low stride at the end — is intended to stretch out his various muscles, the force behind them slowly building until his arm whips through at release: snap!
There are echoes of other pitching greats in Lincecum’s delivery, but his father directed the design and assembly of its component parts and is fiercely possessive of it. When I mentioned to him later in the afternoon that Lincecum’s college coach, Ken Knutson, had taken a measure of credit for Lincecum’s success — that, in Knutson’s formulation, Lincecum’s father had taught him how to throw, but he had taught him how to pitch — Lincecum’s dad was dubious. “Timmy likes Ken, and Ken was really good to Timmy,” he said. “But he promised me he wouldn’t mess with him, and he didn’t. And why would he? Timmy was the best thing he’d ever seen.”
Lincecum’s talent was apparent early, but his size was an issue. His freshman year in high school, he was still just 4-foot-11 and 85 pounds; a year later, he was 5-foot-3 and barely 100. “Before the season started, it was always a question of: Am I still going to be able to hang with these guys?” Lincecum said. “People were maturing, and I was still prepubescent.” When an old teammate of Knutson’s who had coached Lincecum in a summer league brought him by a University of Washington practice, Knutson wasn’t sure what to think: “I was, like: for real, you think this puny kid is going to be good enough to pitch in the Pac-10?” Lincecum finally hit a growth spurt his junior year, shooting up to 5-foot-8, 130 pounds. His fastball jumped from the low 80s to the high 80s. And with the added speed came more movement.
In college, Lincecum was named Pac-10 pitcher of the year as a freshman. He entered the Major League Baseball draft after his sophomore season. The Cleveland Indians selected him with the 1,261st pick. Thurman, his agent, asked for a $1 million signing bonus; the Indians refused to go above $400,000. Lincecum went back to school for another year, winning the 2006 Golden Spikes Award, baseball’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy. Because of his size and unorthodox mechanics, he was still available when the Giants made their first-round pick that summer. He was the 10th player chosen.
Lincecum began the 2007 season in the minors but was called up in a matter of weeks after several utterly dominant starts with the Giants’ Class AAA affiliate in Fresno, Calif. He won the Cy Young Award in 2008 and 2009, his first two full years in the major leagues, and looked every bit as unhittable at the opening of the 2010 season.
At least initially, Lincecum’s problems were easily overlooked. A rough outing here and there was simply attributed to bad luck or a bad day: that’s just baseball. By the middle of August, though, when Lincecum suffered his third defeat in a row, it was evident that he was no longer himself. “He was losing for the first time in his life, and he was doing it on a national stage,” the Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti told me later.
There was no shortage of speculation about the cause. Lincecum’s fastball, which was clocked at 100 miles per hour in his big-league debut, had lost some velocity. Was he out of shape? Was Lincecum not laid-back but lazy? The fatalists were sure that it was arm trouble, that Lincecum’s unusual delivery had finally caught up with him.
For his part, Lincecum hadn’t felt right for much of the season, or at least not consistently right. He had become hypersensitive to the idiosyncrasies of the National League’s various mounds, complaining repeatedly to Righetti that he was having trouble getting comfortable during games. As one disappointing outing led to another, Lincecum searched impatiently for a solution. He was grasping, trying everything to turn himself around, from wearing his socks higher to changing his delivery, which he had not tinkered with since he was 8. “With Timmy, unlike most people, because of the bar he sets for himself, there had to be an answer,” Righetti said.
Lincecum had made a career of proving doubters wrong, but now that he was expected to shut down every team he faced, he felt a different kind of pressure to perform. “The fact that people were like, ‘Is he ever going to be the same Tim Lincecum?’ or whatever the hell they were saying — it all crept up into my head,” he told me. “I started thinking about every aspect of my delivery as opposed to just doing it and trusting it.”
Ultimately, it took a combination of factors to pull Lincecum out of his funk. He started running stadium steps to strengthen his leg muscles, the key to a pitcher’s power, and began using his slider a lot more. He also drew inspiration from an emotional pep talk that the Giants general manager, Brian Sabean, gave to the team’s pitching staff in late August, urging them not to give up in spite of the Padres’ seemingly insurmountable lead.
Most of all, Lincecum had to come to terms with the fact that every pitcher struggles. All he could do was to try to relax and find his way through it. “It’s about accepting it,” he says. “That’s hard to tell people, just because they’re like, ‘What the hell? He’s accepting that he sucks?’ No, it’s like, ‘I can’t do anything about the past. I’m going to get better from here, stop trying to reinvent myself, trust my stuff and move on.’ ”
After Lincecum and I had talked for a little while, I unpacked my laptop and put in a DVD of the fifth and final game of the 2010 World Series. Lincecum’s grim August had been followed by a glorious September. The Giants beat the Padres to win the division on the final day of the season and defeated the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies in the playoffs.
To my surprise, this was the first time that Lincecum, who spent the better part of the off-season watching TV and playing video games, had seen any of the World Series. We went straight to the seventh inning, the turning point of the game. Lincecum and the Texas Rangers’ ace, Cliff Lee, had matched zeros for six innings, but in the top of the seventh, the Giants went ahead 3-0 on a three-run home run by Edgar Renteria. (“Boom!” Lincecum said, watching Renteria’s bat meet the ball. “That was so awesome, so awesome.”
It was up to Lincecum to protect the lead.“Right there I threw him a changeup. I was like, ‘Make sure you keep this down,’ because I knew he was going to want to chase,” he said as we watched the Rangers’ Vladimir Guerrero chop futilely at a ball in the dirt for the first out.
Lincecum doesn’t watch a lot of pregame film, as many pitchers do, to look for vulnerabilities in the hitters he’s about to face. “I stick to my strengths as opposed to going after everyone’s weaknesses,” he told me. “If you can hit it, come hit it.”
The next batter, Nelson Cruz, did just that, sending the ball over the left-field wall. Lincecum then walked Ian Kinsler, bringing the tying run to the plate. It looked like Lincecum could easily unravel. I thought of him just two months earlier, dealing for the first time with self-doubt, questioning things that for so long had been second nature. But he was clearly back to his old self now. “You’ve done this a million times,” he said when I asked him what he was thinking as the next hitter came to the plate. “This is just another game. Pitch your game.”
Back-to-back strikeouts later, Lincecum had killed Texas’s rally and was walking coolly back to the dugout. The Fox camera panned to a displeased-looking Nolan Ryan, an owner of the Rangers and a pitching legend himself whose records Lincecum may one day surpass. “Sorry, Nolan,” Lincecum said.
Getting your panties in a bunch over someone getting their panties in a bunch is HOMO.
Lol, I'm not even getting mad...which would be "getting my panties in a bunch"....fag. Not even talking shit about the Giants either, learn how to read. Defending homosexual actions makes you a HOMO. Now go back to beating off to all your Brian Wilson pics you have saved on your computer.
Lol, I'm not even getting mad...which would be "getting my panties in a bunch"....fag. Not even talking shit about the Giants either, learn how to read. Defending homosexual actions makes you a HOMO. Now go back to beating off to all your Brian Wilson pics you have saved on your computer.
This kid is a staight faggot. at least you admitted to having your panties in a bunch... learn how to read LMAO. Try it before you post next time.
Where does bitter padre fan talking shit, have to the Giants? Are you that fucking stupid? LEARN HOW TO READ........
Making a statement into something homosexual is something that females or padre fans do...
Quit your faggot ass crying in this giants thread. Talking about nothing and not having a damn thing to say but bitching....
Where does bitter padre fan talking shit, have to the Giants? Are you that fucking stupid? LEARN HOW TO READ........
Making a statement into something homosexual is something that females or padre fans do...
Quit your faggot ass crying in this giants thread. Talking about nothing and not having a damn thing to say but bitching....
I would love to see this kid call me a faggot to my face, anybody can act hard on the internet.
Bitter? I'm not bitter one fucking bit. If anyone is bitter it's you over the Bob Sanders thread buddy. Get the fuck over it and quit getting your "panties in a bunch". "Have to the Giants"??? That didn't make sense. LEARN HOW TO TYPE.....
But you failed to acknowledge the fact that you are getting your panties in a bunch over what YOU presume as somebody else "getting their panties in a bunch"....which sure as hell is not the case. HOMO. You're doing the exact same thing that you just called "HOMO". Hilarious! Also, if you would learn how to read you would see that I'm not bitching and have always posted in contribution to the discussion i.e. the signing of Tejada etc. I know you live to argue with people on the internet but that's not really my cup of tea. So please evacuate my nuts and as I said, go back to beating off to your Brian Wilson pics.
Bitter? I'm not bitter one fucking bit. If anyone is bitter it's you over the Bob Sanders thread buddy. Get the fuck over it and quit getting your "panties in a bunch". "Have to the Giants"??? That didn't make sense. LEARN HOW TO TYPE.....
But you failed to acknowledge the fact that you are getting your panties in a bunch over what YOU presume as somebody else "getting their panties in a bunch"....which sure as hell is not the case. HOMO. You're doing the exact same thing that you just called "HOMO". Hilarious! Also, if you would learn how to read you would see that I'm not bitching and have always posted in contribution to the discussion i.e. the signing of Tejada etc. I know you live to argue with people on the internet but that's not really my cup of tea. So please evacuate my nuts and as I said, go back to beating off to your Brian Wilson pics.
Nothing wrong with posting in another team's thread. It's not like I'm being immature like some other people who just pop into their rival team's thread to say dumb shit like "FUCK YOU GUYS!!!!!!" or "FUCK THE MIDGETS!!!!!". Like I said I have always made sure to contribute to the discussion at hand. In this case I just asked one simple question and cause this uproar because nobody can explain how it's not homo to drool over another man's beard. That's it, one question then all this nonsense starts. It's becoming lightweight entertaining though lol.