How Tim Lincecum Is Rediscovering MLB Success in 2015

Tim Lincecum will never again be the pitcher who won two Cy Young Awards and flummoxed National League hitters with a crackling fastball and corkscrew windup that earned him the nickname "The Freak."

That doesn't mean all is lost.

Just ask the fans at AT&T Park who gave Lincecum a standing ovation Wednesday after the slender right-hander twirled seven shutout innings against the archrival Los Angeles Dodgers.

On a damp, misty San Francisco night that called to mind the bygone days of Candlestick Park, Lincecum played his own version of turn back the clock, scattering three hits and lowering his ERA to a stingy 2.08.

More importantly, the Giants won 4-0 and shut out the Dodgers for the second consecutive night.

The defending champs now sit at 22-18, 2.5 games behind Los Angeles in the NL West. Lincecum has been a big part of that, even if he hasn't pitched like his old self.

His velocity sits in the mid- to high 80s, a far cry from the hard-throwing glory years. And he's battled control issues and bouts of downright wildness, both of which were on display Wednesday.

Take this sequence in the fifth inning: Lincecum gave up a hard-hit double to Yasmani Grandal, then allowed the Dodgers catcher to advance to third on a wild pitch. He recovered to retire the next two hitters and keep Grandal at third, but then walked the opposing pitcher, Brett Anderson.

And so mashing rookie Joc Pederson strode to the plate with a chance to break a scoreless tie. It was one of those moments Lincecum has faced so often over the past few seasons, when everything can—and frequently does—unravel.

Instead, he got Pederson on a ground ball to first. Inning over.

So it goes for Lincecum. Every outing, good or bad, is a high-wire act, brilliant one second, teetering on collapse the next.

This season, though, for the first time in a long time, he has (mostly) kept his balance. 

Luis M. Alvarez/Associated Press

Lincecum's run of dominance ended abruptly in 2012, when he posted a 5.18 ERA and was relegated primarily to the bullpen in the postseason, as San Francisco streaked to its second championship in three seasons.

He posted plus-4.00 ERAs in 2013 and 2014. And while he picked up a third ring, he became one of the least reliable starting pitchers not only on the Giants, but in all of baseball.

This winter, Lincecum went back to the drawing board. Or, more accurately, he went back to his dad, Chris Lincecum, who helped invent Tim's unorthodox delivery.

"I needed the help," Lincecum said in February, per Carl Steward of the Bay Area News Group (h/t San Jose Mercury News). "I didn’t feel like my mechanics were in a place where I could rely on them. They've been kind of out of whack for awhile now. It was definitely freeing for me to be able to say that to him and for him to understand where I was coming from."

So far, as SB Nation's Matt Goldman noted May 9, Lincecum's release point has been more consistent than at any time in his big league career. We're only a couple of months into the season, but that's an unambiguously positive sign.

Lincecum is also relying more heavily on the fastball-changeup combination that was once his bread and butter.

Between 2007 and 2010, Lincecum threw those two pitches more than any other, per FanGraphs. In 2011, the slider supplanted the changeup as his favored secondary pitch, and by 2014 he was throwing it more than 25 percent of the time.

So far this season, he's throwing the slider not merely less often, but less often than any other pitch.

Ben Margot/Associated Press

Again, we're dealing with a small sample size here, so it's unwise to draw sweeping conclusions, just as it's premature to predict Lincecum's current success will continue.

The Giants, though, have to be encouraged by what they've seen, particularly when the rest of their rotation is littered with question marks. 

World Series hero Madison Bumgarner is a stud among studs, but Matt Cain and Jake Peavy are on the disabled list, Ryan Vogelsong has had an up-and-down year, and surprise rookie Chris Heston is still an unknown commodity. 

Given all that, how huge would a resurgent Lincecum be? 

"I kind of just read the swings now," Lincecum told Andrew Baggarly of the San Jose Mercury News (h/t Contra Costa Times) after notching a win May 3 against the Los Angeles Angels. "I'm not stuck on a one-dimensional game plan anymore. Each pitch sets up the next one."

San Francisco will never get its old Freak back. But maybe this new Freak will work out just fine.

All statistics current as of May 20 and courtesy of MLB.com unless otherwise noted.