August was a month I personally spent in a continuous fetal position, rocking back and forth, kept company only by my readers and schizophrenic thoughts. What was the catalyst for this behavior? Why, Giants baseball, dear reader — Giants baseball. They found a good way to go from being the hottest team in the National League to not even being the hottest team in the Bay Area. July was this exceedingly awesome dream-month that didn't seem real even when I printed out game box scores to confirm that my screen wasn't just exceedingly scratched and smudged in areas that would make such things misleading. Then August happened, and with that, Tim Lincecum went all "Barry Zito," on us. Alright, that wasn't fair... anyway, more after the jump.
Tim Lincecum had a terrible month of August to go with his year that, up to that point, wasn't very impressive regardless. It's not good if you're a Giants fan and you get that bad feeling in the pit of your stomach when a Lincecum start is coming later that night. I remember, not so long ago (or was it... forever ago?), when a Tim Lincecum start meant that you hopped on McCovey Chronicles and busted out the best .gif images money could theoretically buy if .gif images were at a premium and sold only to teams with pitching aces who flat out made batters look silly. Perhaps that time was further off than I thought...
Fast-forward to this past Wednesday and I'm watching Giants Pregame Live on CSN Bay Area. They're talking about how September represents a change for Lincecum. He's pitching on the first and he can make this his month. After a scary start to the game (in which I face-palmed in advance of actual bad pitches to get ahead of the count), Lincecum was basically shut-down in the Giants 2-1 win over the Rockies. His velocity was down, then it was up, then it was down again, but — and this is important — he didn't react poorly to pressure, he didn't slacken as the game went on. In fact, he only got better.
Maybe there's something to this whole "September," thing for Timmy. I sure hope that there is, because it's clear Lincecum is a master of his craft, and there's nothing better than watching a master at work. Oh, and winning is nice, too. Yeah, I do enjoy that "winning," thing.