Baseball’s Mt. Pinatubo erupts again — Lincecum throws a second no-hitter
SAN FRANCISCO, California — Last year, when Lincecum was struggling and thought to be in his last season as a San Francisco Giant, he threw his first no-hitter against the San Diego Padres.
It was like his version of Mt. Pinatubo erupting — a reminder that while his season’s performance was somewhat lackluster, approximating the look of a dormant volcano at times, he was still indeed, “active.”
You just never know.
And then this week, it happened again.
In a year when Lincecum can be wild and out of control in the first inning, run up the pitch count to 50 in just two innings (a full game usually is 100 pitches), in this game against the Padres, he was dominant and in control.
He struck out six and walked one (Chase Headley in the 2nd, which kept the game from being perfect). But mostly Lincecum enlisted the aid of his fielders, as he coaxed the Padres to hit the ball weakly into Giant gloves. It was the kind of game you watch and just record the outs. It just seemed to flow that easily.
Then it’s the 5th inning and you look up and say,” Hey, the Padres have no-hits.”
But it wasn’t Lincecum’s pitching that made me notice something was up.
It was his own two hits.
Once I joked with Lincecum about the World Baseball Classic and told him he could be the Philippines team. Himself.
And he said, ”Yeah, but then I’d have to hit.”
His hitting is not thought of highly, even by himself.
But there he was in the bottom of the third inning with a single that led to him scoring the Giants second run.
He had one hit. The Padres had none.
Back on the mound, Lincecum kept collecting outs in a routine manner.
And then I noticed in the fifth, the Padres still had no hits.
At this point, I remember asking him once about superstitions and jinxes, and unlike Filipinos who believe in faith healers and the like, Lincecum is not big on superstition.
“Superstitions were something earlier in my career, but you try to simplify things and eliminate things that shouldn’t be in the game,” Lincecum said.
Which explains why he wasn’t the isolated stoic in the dugout during the game.
Still, I didn’t want to jinx a no-hitter, even in a tweet.
But then came the 7th inning, and Lincecum got his 2nd hit.
He’s got two hits as a batter, and the Padres still had NONE.
We are in pure omen territory.
I refrained from thinking about it further.
I may even cop to saying a partial rosary.
But Lincecum did it all on the mound.
He got the Padres out without a threat in the 8th and the 9th.
And that was that. History.
In the history of baseball dating back to the 1870s, there have been 285 no-hitters, and Lincecum has thrown two of them.
Against the same San Diego Padre team.
Dare I say, he’s the first baseball player with Filipino blood in the history of the sport to throw two no-hitters.
That makes him a double no-hit hurler. A double Cy Young Award winner for best National League pitcher and a double World Series Champion.
Is there a partial Filipino with a better resume than that?
Last year, when I followed Lincecum more closely, it was largely because there was the thought he could be traded. And it could be his last year with the Giants, the team where he is beloved by the community. The team where he caught Manny Pacquiao’s ceremonial first pitch before a Giants’ Filipino Heritage Night.
But after the no-hitter, and soon after the 2013 season ended, the Giants gave him his reward. A two-year $35 million dollar deal.
This year, multimillionaire Lincecum has been erratic. You hoped he had the stuff to get him to the 6th inning. You hoped that the Giants had the offense to fight back and win if he fell behind early. It was just different from the days when we expected an automatic win. Those were the Cy Young years, when we called a Lincecum start, “Timmy Day.”
The last two years, at times he’s been wild and unpredictable.
But he’s Major League Baseball’s Mount Pinatubo.
And on Wednesday, quite unexpectedly, he erupted.
Again.
