Tim Lincecum, your favorite hipster, has pitched many marvelous games in San Francisco; Saturday night was not one of them. His freaky flameout in a big game has put “Your” SF Giants’ season on life support.
The team has not been feeling the love of late from Lady Luck and tonight they were shunned again. Friday night’s 6-2 victory seemed like an illusion in the wake of a 7-2 defeat. It was not a simple reversal of fortune. It felt like rejection, and that’s the way Timmy looked when he left the mound unable to finish six innings, like a kid after a bad date
You don’t like the Diamondbacks: the players are good enough, but what bothers you is that their Snakepit is Phoenix and their Owner spends big money in support of Arizona’s immigrant-scapegoating vipers.
“In most ball games,” wrote Christy Mathewson, former Giant pitching ace, “there comes an inning on which hangs victory or defeat.” In this game, that inning was the fifth. Down 2-1 but not unsettled, after two easy outs, Lincecum walks two consecutive batters on nine pitches. Sudden. Inexplicable. What just happened? The Snakes come away with only one run, but that sequence revealed something fundamental you can’t see. Maybe Ian Kennedy can’t see it either, but he feels it. Unsteady until then, he now looks confident, very confident, working quickly through his half of the inning.
After Arizona’s barbers take the razors to Timmy’s head in the sixth, the game enters a stretch of boredom which brings the issue of immigration back to mind for a while.
You realize the D-backs Owner may be a snake, but he’s not the only one. After all, the MLB, a significant economic player in Arizona, refused to move it’s All-Star game from Phoenix to protest the notorious “papers please” SB1070 even though many of its players stand directly in the law’s crosshairs.
Locally, elders from the Mission’s Casa Hispana de Bellas Artes asked GiantsInc. to protest the implicit racism of the Arizona law by having the Giants wear their “Gigantes” jerseys when the D-backs came to town. “Your” Gigantes have worn their “Giants” jerseys. “[W]e don’t want to take a political stance,” GiantsInc told the SF Bay Guardian, echoing the talking points (“political line”) handed down from MLB.
Whether this principled corporate stand encouraged other states to mimic and go beyond Arizona, no one can say. Alabama recently upped the ante by requiring schools to interrogate students as to their immigration status
In the bottom of the eighth, Keppinger singles, Beltran doubles. Up comes Pablo Sandoval. A fly ball will bring in a run; a base hit will bring in two; a home run will change the game’s momentum.
Sandoval hits a fly ball. Keppinger scores. Beltran tries for second and the game’s last hope gets snuffed out
Has the season been snuffed out as well?
The constitutionality of both Arizona or Alabama laws is currently being challenged in court.