the giants won two out of three so whatever you should just be happy with that can't win 'em all and a .667 winning percentage would be like a 110-win team and whatever so overall i'm happy with how the padres series went all told and so forth.
I'm not greedy. I don't expect Tim Lincecum to be a Cy Young candidate again. Those were fun seasons, but I can accept that they have a museum-like quality now.
I don't have an idea in mind about what I'd be happy with from Lincecum now. A 3.50 ERA? A 3.80 ERA? A 110 ERA+? Less? More? I'll know it when I see it.
All I really want is to be able to talk about Lincecum like he's an normal pitcher. I want to talk about his ups and downs in the same way we talk about Barry Zito's ups and downs. I want to call a bad stretch of pitching a "bad stretch of pitching." I want to revel in his hot streaks and say, boy howdy, he sure is throwing a good rock these days. I want to point to a ball that wasn't caught, and blame a loss on it.
I think we were about one or two starts away from taking an it-happens! approach to a bad outing. Oh, mercy, how sweet that would have been. Last year on September 3, Lincecum gave up five runs and a homer in five innings against Arizona. Here was a quote from that post-game thread:
Lincecum wasn't sharp, the Giants didn't have a lot of balls fall their way, and there it goes.
He wasn't sharp! Sounds so quaint, so simple. Lincecum wasn't sharp, everybody! Let's talk about the 30 other things that were annoying about the game. But don't worry about Lincecum. He just wasn't sharp, alright. Had that "not-so-sharp feeling" as he walked down a beach with his dad, talking about things. Not a problem.
Instead, Lincecum is broken unless he's unlucky unless he's hurt unless he's fine unless he's not, and every little thing he does has to be micro-analyzed into a fine powder. I mean, honest question: If Angel Pagan breaks the right way on a two-out bloop in the fourth inning, this game means something completely different. Here's how that inning went: bloop single by Honus Guzman, sharp ground-ball base hit from John Baker, walk, and a bloop double in front of Pagan to score two. Isn't that the kind of it-happens! that pitchers have to deal with every so often?
Don't know.
What about the home runs? That's proof that something's up, that there's something irrevocably wrong with Lincecum, right? Every pitcher gives up home runs, but with Lincecum it's because of mechanics lack of arm strength lack of focus poor concentration poor conditioning diminished fastball.
Don't know. And until he's 11-2 with a 2.10 ERA next All-Star break, we won't know or feel comfortable about anything. It's possible that whatever was wrong with Lincecum was fixed a month ago, and he's just been his normal self since then, subject to the same kinds of vagaries and nonsense that all pitchers have to deal with. It's possible that Lincecum will never be fixed.
Don't know. Don't know. Don't know. Maybe I should just pick a less-tired, easier-to-understand topic like Brandon Belt. All I want is the ability to lead with, BOY HOWDY, LOOKS LIKE WE GOT SHUT DOWN BY JASON ******* MARQUIS, AIN'T THAT A PEACH. Instead, it's Lincecum. Always Lincecum.
Also, just kidding about the first sentence of that last passage. I really am greedy! Quite greedy. I want the Giants to win another World Series, even though they just did so. I want them to beat the Pirates in the NLCS, and then the Orioles in the World Series. And I want to get really, really cocky about it.
Sounds like some kind of wonderful dream, right? And, yeah, winning two out of every three games is probably a good way to accomplish that. It's like M. Night Shyamalan rewriting the last third of every Hitchock movie. It turns out that the crop duster was being flown by aliens, sucker! And it makes you forget everything good that came before.
Here we are again, wondering if we should be happy about a good series in the face of a bad game. This is the most confusing good team I've ever followed.