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Basketball on Aircraft Carrier Offers Different Kind of Flight
By Nick Canepa
Gigantic basketball players weren't comfortably made for Navy ships. They weren't even made for a comfortable fit on gigantic Navy aircraft carriers. They fly coach, it's on Air Sardine.
The height limit may be 6-8, but even the …Read more.
Realignment? MLB Has So Much More to Work On
By Nick Canepa
Realignment should be reserved for automobiles and spines, not baseball. They're constantly massaging this game. They should leave it alone.
But there is discussion about it in Commissioner Bud Selig's court, talk of realignment, …Read more.
Draft History Indicates Padres Picks in Trouble
By Nick Canepa
Not since the Dust Bowl have we seen infertility on farms to equal those plowed by the Padres. Nothing has worked. They've rotated their crops, tried both cheap and expensive fertilizer, changed owners, changed GMs, changed scouts, …Read more.
Sweetening Scholarships Won't Affect Big Divide
By Tim Sullivan
Jim Delany has launched a trial balloon that a lot of people have mistaken for the Hindenburg.
The Big Ten commissioner wants to sweeten the deal for scholarship athletes, to divert some of his conference's bulging coffers into the …Read more.
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Lincecum Throws Fastball By Game's Conventional WisdomBy Tim Sullivan Bruce Bochy's first impression of Tim Lincecum was bewilderment. Here was this shaggy-haired kid with the build of a skeleton, so slight that he might blow away in a mild breeze, as peculiar to a baseball clubhouse as a string quartet. When the manager of the San Francisco Giants first beheld the club's scrawny pitching prodigy in spring 2007, his reflexive response was, "You've got to be kidding me." "He looked," Bochy said Wednesday, "like the bat boy." And then he started to throw. "It was impressive," Bochy said after Lincecum's emphatic 8-4 victory over the Padres. "You look at this kid and think he's more of a 'finesser.' But he was a power pitcher. He's changed a little bit, become more of a complete pitcher, but he hit 96-97 (miles per hour) coming out of that arm." If appearances can be deceiving, Tim Lincecum's is a baldfaced lie. San Francisco's singularly unimposing specimen is the triumph of physics over physique, a long-striding, torque-generating, batter-baffling 5-foot-11 "freak" whose preternatural pitching has been a recurring taunt to conventional wisdom, preconceived notions and seasoned scouting. Numerous baseball executives talked themselves out of drafting Lincecum because they feared he was too frail and his unorthodox delivery too dangerous. They probably should have paid more attention to how hard he was to hit. "He's proved all the naysayers wrong," Bochy said. Twice the National League's Cy Young Award winner, twice the winning pitcher in the Giants' 2010 World Series triumph, Lincecum is the ace the Padres must try to trump if they are to compete effectively in the National League West. He was the guy toying with the Home Team on Wednesday afternoon. Lincecum became the third visiting pitcher to record 13 strikeouts at Petco Park, and he did so in the space of seven innings and without issuing a walk. Having faced Lincecum 14 times now, the Padres are way past first impressions, but still conspicuously short on solutions.
He might look like a kid destined to have sand kicked in his face, but his stuff is as muscular as the biggest bully on the beach. He has given the Giants an important edge in a short series and a formidable presence every fifth day. "The first time I faced him, he was throwing 98 (miles per hour)," Padres third baseman Chase Headley said. "I'm like, 'This guy's come to play.' It's amazing with the frame that he has the arm speed and velocity he has. When he's on like (Wednesday), it's going to be a tough day." If anything, the days ahead may be tougher still. Having expanded his repertoire to four reliable pitches by developing a slider last season, Lincecum has multiplied the guess hitter's degree of difficulty. He struck out six of the first seven hitters he faced Wednesday and left the game before Padres cleanup hitter Brad Hawpe had succeeded in hitting a fair ball. "He had all of his weapons going today," said Padres outfielder Will Venable, who struck out twice in three at-bats against Lincecum. "I've seen him like that a couple of times before. He seemed like he was comfortable with everything he was throwing." "That's probably as electric as I've seen his fastball all spring," Giants catcher Buster Posey said. Lincecum left the game leading 8-1, and just two strikeouts shy of his career high with six outs remaining. And he was perfectly content to pass the baton. "If I get 13 strikeouts, whenever it happens it's for the benefit of the team," Lincecum said. "Obviously there's the acknowledgment of myself and what that means to me. (But) when we win, that's the most important. If I strike out 13 and we lose, who cares?" He was sitting in a corner of the visitor's clubhouse, fielding questions with little expression or inflection and without the postgame ice pack that has become standard issue for starting pitchers. If Lincecum's success has startled scouts, opponents and even his manager, the man himself appears unmoved. It's no accident that GQ magazine named him one of the 25 "coolest" athletes of all time. Tim Lincecum might look like the batboy, but he forces you to look closer. Tim Sullivan writes about sports for The San Diego Union-Tribune. COPYRIGHT 2011 THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE. DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
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