Thursday, November 19, 2009

Who else loves Tim Lincecum's hair?

So it was announced today that Tim Lincecum barely beat out the two Cardinals aces for the NL Cy Young award in what was one of the closest votes in history.  I'm not that big a baseball fan anymore, but those three pitchers (Lincecum, Adam Wainwright, and Chris Carpenter) have to be three of my favorites in the game.  Two of them are obviously so, because they play for my hometown team...and they're really good.

Lincecum, though, has other interesting characteristics.  By complete coincidence, I happened to catch his first career MLB start on May 6, 2007.  I'm not even sure why I watched that ESPN Sunday Night Game between the Giants and Phillies, because by that time I had already lost most of my interest in baseball, which had peaked during the golden days of fantasy baseball in college and a little after.  In any case, I remember being impressed by the Giants starter, who had a shaky first inning debut but ended up striking out 3.  He was a young guy of relatively slight build (for a pitcher anyway), and he had some lights-out stuff.  In my mind, he immediately drew comparisons to Roy Oswalt.

Anyway, it's about two-and-a-half years later, and that kid has two Cy Young awards to his name.  Since that day, I've seen Lincecum pitch in person - I was lucky enough to draw his starting position in the rotation when I went to a Giants-A's game in San Francisco earlier this summer (June 12).  He didn't absolutely dominate that day, but he tossed a complete game without giving up any runs.

So when it came time to decide who to root for in the Cy Young race, I had a tough time choosing.  I figured that one of the Cardinals would get it, since the Giants didn't do very well this year and Lincecum had a low win total.  But between the two Cards pitchers, I couldn't pick either - Wainwright tossed more innings and had more wins, but Carpenter had mostly better statistics otherwise.  I was pretty surprised to learn that Lincecum took the award, but in a way I way was glad.  It would have been nice for a Cardinal to win it, but I couldn't choose one over the other.  And my favorite pitcher over the last couple of years did win after all.

Oh, and did I mention how awesome his hair is?  I mean, look at that thing:

This is a screenshot of the video of his reaction after winning the award today, which you can check out here.  Maybe his hair is the reason he won it.  You don't see mops like that on many major league players.

2 comments:

  1. HAHA I am jealous of his hair!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lincecum inspires me to grow my hair out...

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.