Tim Lincecum's Long Goodnight

It took 267 starts, 1,799 innings, and tens of thousands of pitches thrown across nine major league seasons, but, at the age of 31, Tim Lincecum finally appears to be heading to the disabled list.

This is a story, or at least some uneven pavement on the MLB season's endless stretch of highway. This sort of thing happens all the time, of course, and is invariably reported in the usual antiseptic transaction language: Giants place RHP Tim Lincecum (right forearm contusion) on the 15-day DL, retroactive to 6/28. Generally, that's all there is to it. Some miles down the road Giants will pick him back up when he's healthy, usher him back onto the Winnebago, and the team will caravan along as planned.

There was a time, circa 2009 or so, when a Lincecum arm injury would have represented something much larger. It would have been A Story, and received with the sort of frenzy that greeted Giancarlo Stanton's broken hamate bone last week. Peak Lincecum would have deserved nothing less, and he probably would have inspired even more. This was how it was supposed to go for him: one of Lincecum's willowy limbs would finally snap under the combined strain of his strange motion and the overarching, overwhelming strain of pitching, and that would be that.

Lincecum's apex is so fuzzy and faded, and he's reinvented himself enough times, that it's easy to forget how weird and electric he was as a youngster. No pitcher was more fun to watch, because no one offered a more stark juxtaposition between aesthetics and arsenal. He looked like a Gorillaz animation brought to life—the casual glaze in his stare, the cascade of hair spilling out from underneath his cap. And yet there he was, scything a slider and tilting a curve and stopping time with his change. Then there was the fastball, which he did not throw so much as catapult. It registered 26 runs above average in 2008, the third-highest total in the majors, and Lincecum wielded it as a 96mph argument-ender to any hitter with the audacity to fight his way back from 1-2 to a full count. I had the privilege of seeing it in person that year, and even more impressive than the raw velocity was watching the repeated impossibility of his whippet-thin frame summoning such force. Seemingly every part of his body reared back at once, so much so that he appeared to be straining against his own constitution as much as his physical limits.

None of this seemed entirely real—cartoons never do—but Lincecum pitched this way throughout college, the minors and the first two years of his Major League career. Lincecum was a unique attraction and fretted over as much as enjoyed, because there was no duplicating or even approximating him. There didn't seem to be any discernible way for him to be around very long, not with his famously jarring delivery and the sheer visual implausibility he presented. A DL stint was preordained; the only question was the date on the calendar.

For all the time spent imagining his demise, no one ever bothered considering the alternative: what it would look like if Lincecum hung around too long. We have been watching the answer to that question for years. He is a pitcher whose strikeout rate has declined in four consecutive seasons as his walk rate has climbed for three, and who hasn't posted an ERA under 4.00 since before Obama's re-election. Lincecum, along with the velocity of his fastball, is slowly fading away. What's left of him in 2015 barely passes muster as back-end starter. The same pitcher who once rang up a dozen of those fastballs in a single inning has only topped 90 nine times all season.

Lincecum has always been so easy to caricature as a two-dimensional stoner jock that it's been too easy to miss his baseball genius. Few pitchers, maybe ever, compare to Lincecum in his combination of having both the self-awareness of his limitations and the wherewithal to attempt an overhaul. He won the Cy Young in 2008 on the strength of that fastball and it started to abandon him almost immediately after he was crowned, dipping nearly two miles in average velocity the following season. He responded by crafting his changeup into the single best pitch in the major leagues in 2009, and captured a second consecutive Cy with an even lower ERA. Things became untenable when his fastball took another hit in 2012, but that hasn't stopped him from trying everything possible to tinker with his dwindling physical gifts, from annually increasing his slider output to briefly impersonating an ultra-groundballer for the first two months of this season. None of it really worked, because there's only so much a shrimpy, soft-tossing fly ball guy can really do when his hardest stuff might not even match another pitcher's power change-up.

He might now be the single least-exciting starter in the game, the cruelest blow of all to a player who generated such singular excitement not so long ago. But there is honor to the fact that, painful as he now is to watch, Lincecum still keeps reminding everyone how little we truly know about pitching. Many of his contemporaries can't say the same; the likes of Roy Halladay, Brandon Webb, Johan Santana and, soon, Cliff Lee have seen their arms give out too soon. Halladay was supposed to go into his 40's, and then his sturdy oak frame abruptly snapped like a sapling. Linecum is his counterpoint—he seems so frail, and his talent was vanishing before he entered his nominal prime, but he has just kept taking his turn and doing his best to make it work. His long-awaited DL stint is finally here and, of all things, it's for a mundane contusion that probably won't keep him out beyond the minimum 15 days. He shouldn't still be here, but he is. And he will be back, if only as his reduced self.

There are murmurings that the Giants will use this as the impetus to finally bump him from the rotation, which is a sound decision for every reason except sentimental ones. Lincecum could transition full time into the mega-reliever role that he filled so admirably during the Giants' World Series runs, or this could precipitate a break from the only professional organization he's ever known. The one safe bet is that he'll keep moving, whether he has to shuffle or stumble or crawl. We'll see him on up the road.