Maybe it’s the purple that puts Tim Lincecum in a haze against the Rockies.
Lincecum, your basic back-to-back Cy Young Award candidate, couldn’t find his rhythm Sunday afternoon. Couldn’t put all the working parts together. Couldn’t find the plate, much less paint the black.
“I was battling myself today,” Lincecum said. “I was erratic, kind of all over the place.”
No surprise there. He was facing the Rockies, a team that, if it weren’t for that giant lettuce patch on his head, would make him pull his hair out.
Lincecum lost five games in 2008 en route to winning his first Cy Young Award, with two of the five coming against the Rockies. Sunday marked his first start against them in 2009, and, sure enough, he walked away with another loss.
The only surprise was that, for all his struggles — he pitched out of the stretch at times with no runners on base to simplify his delivery — he had a no-hitter going into the sixth inning. A no-hitter, three walks and one hit batter, that is.
“I had a hard time finding it,” Lincecum said. “I’ve got a lot of working parts in my windup, so sometimes I pitch out of the stretch to simplify things. I still managed to get through the first five all right, and they just banged me the last couple of innings. That’s the way it goes.”
Yes, Lincecum was aware he had a no-no going until Todd Helton singled up the middle with one out in the sixth.
“I look up at the scoreboard every once in a while to see where it’s at,” he said. “I’m not looking for the no-hitter, I’m just kind of looking up at the scoreboard.”
Lincecum was clinging to a 2-1 lead in the seventh until a fateful hanging changeup that Seth Smith slammed into the second deck in right field. The Giants, meanwhile, grabbed a 2-0 lead in the second on Edgar Renteria’s two-run homer but couldn’t push across another run against Ubaldo Jimenez.
“We talked about this matchup, and both guys did what we all thought,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. “We got what we wanted, a good pitching performance and the lead. We just couldn’t add on to it.”
Lincecum finished with seven strikeouts and five walks in seven innings. To put those numbers in perspective, he went into the game with a major league-leading 207 strikeouts and 46 walks.
“I got behind guys a lot,” he said. “It put me in a ton of pressure situations, high pitch counts, 3-2 situations, which is never something you want to be in.”
If you’ve lost your scorecard, the Giants led 6-1 in the fourth Saturday night and 2-0 in the sixth Sunday. The bottom line? Two losses that dropped them three games behind the Rockies in the National League wild-card race.
“It’s what we’ve been doing, kind of battling ourselves the last couple of days,” Lincecum said. “Hopefully, we’ll find a way to get out of that hole and become ourselves again.”
Jim Armstrong: 303-954-1269 or jmarmstrong@denverpost.com
