As Logan Forsythe’s game-winning home run sailed into the left field stands, I wondered if he was related to 1980’s television acting icon John Forsythe, star of the primetime soap Dynasty. I didn’t bother to dig deep, Google-wise, to see if he was a part of the bloodline, though. Instead, I started thinking about 1980’s television. One of its staples was the doppelganger or the evil twin. It’s a hacky trope to be sure, but if ever there was a team to embrace hacky, it’s the Giants.
In a game that saw four innings of perfection from Tim Lincecum after a second inning that saw more hard hit balls than an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos, it’s easy to say that his ship appears to have been righted and the Giants have their ace back and everything’s going to turn out peachy keen. But Lincecum continues to have these bouts of inconsistency where he just looks bad. Now, he’s not *that* bad, but he’s leaving fat pitches in the zone to be hit and they are being hit. You might argue,
"Every6thDay, you’re a dumb idiot who smells like eight days of taint stank and I think you’re an ignorant piece of crap, so how could you possibly know what’s wrong with Tim Lincecum?" What I know is that in the history of baseball – and the history of covering the game of baseball – if a pitcher gets hit hard a lot, he is considered to be a bad pitcher. You might then say, "Well, Every6thDay, your lack of statistical evidence proves that not only are you a worthless assemblage of genetic material who deserves to be laughed at until he kills himself but that you are letting feelings take the lead when the numbers say otherwise." I see a guy who gives up a lot of baserunners and when bats make contact with his pitches, the ball travels a long way. Call it luck, call it wishful thinking, but it’s all under the umbrella of just bad.
And then he goes out there and totally redeems himself.
Velocity: check. Command: check. Location: check. Stuff: check. Confused spectators and evaluators: check. So, I’m just going to dial up my old ring tone: "Pitchers, man. Pitchers." The more we try to figure them out, the less we know. I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the confusion.
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The Giants were able to battle back from their ace’s hole-digging inning and it was an impressive display of Theriotry, Gregoriousness, and Paganism.
Ryan Theriot has officially been upgraded from "inert" to "shape-holding liquid." His return to cromulence has not only been a welcome surprise of late, it feels like it’s sustainable. And Gregor Blanco, well… he’s amazing. He’s not the second coming of anyone, he’s Gregor Blanco and he is a productive baseball player who is everything the Giants need. That flip job double in the ninth was one of my favorite things I’ve seen from the Giants in a good long while because if I were to characterize it, I’d say it’s like they got tired of being baffled by Huston Street so one of them finally said, "Screw this, I’m going to do something different." Brandon Crawford also had a great at bat late in the game.
All losses hurt, but this one hurt a little less than usual. There were just so many things that went right for the Giants. They were in a hole early, they took the lead late. The partially Beltran-financed bullpen couldn’t hold it down and some guy whose name most other team’s broadcasters can’t even bother to get right blew it against a guy who sounds like he starred in Dynasty. It didn’t work out according to plan and the plan doesn’t work 100% of the time anyway. Then again, the plan includes Tim Lincecum being Tim Lincecum, and when he’s not the whole way through it means improvisation and rewriting get incorporated into the conclusion, and sometimes that means some anonymous names control the outcome. Oh well. That sucked.