Pulling Lincecum Correct Move

I have had plenty of time to digest and get over the heart breaking loss to the Phillies, but I still want to go back and examine the move to pull Tim Lincecum after walking the first batter he faced in the 9th inning. At the time I thought it was the correct call but many other have disagreed.

I have had sometime to go over everything and I still stand by the call by Bruce Bochy and think that it was correct and that this was a 1 in 100 type of outcome that was simply bad luck.

Here you see the plot of Tim Lincecum's fastball from the 4/28/2010 Phillies game. Each line represents the range of speed and the gray dot is the average for each inning he pitched.

After sitting at the 91-93 miles per hour range all day by the eighth inning you can clearly see that his fastball lost some zip. In addition to the lost velocity he also over his career has not fared well the fourth time through the line up.

I	Split	PA	SO/BB	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
	1st PA in G, as SP	910	3.91	.168	.240	.248	.488
	2nd PA in G, as SP	829	2.95	.258	.329	.377	.705
	3rd PA in G, as SP	683	3.11	.213	.281	.311	.593
	4th+ PA in G, as SP	143	1.93	.260	.343	.386	.728

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table

Generated 4/29/2010.

The Phillies had the heart of the linup coming up and with the power and paitence in their lineup things can (and did) get out of hand quickly. Tim Lincecum is a great pitcher probably the best in the game right now but he was showing signs of fatigue and this early in the season it would be very risky to extend Tim unless it was absolutly critical and it wasn't because we had our best relief pitcher ready to go who had been lights out all season.

Bruce Bochy is not a master tactician be any means and certainly makes some head scratching decisions but this was not one of them.

I think that a lot of the hatred aimed at Bochy and Brian Wilson is misdirected. It was the right call in the situation hindsight is 20/20 but 99 ouf of 100 times Wilson comes in and gets the last outs and the Giants get the win. It was a fluke loss but these things happen over the course of the season, all we can do is hope that a few losses turn into wins for us.