Baba Fett Dept. — this article is written by star poster Fett42.  Fett is a Giants' fan, lives in the Bay area IIRC, as well as being an M's fan.  As you'll see, he knows his stuff.  With a capital K.  Thanks amigo!

I woudn't consider myself a great writer, but that doesn't mean I can't pull quotes and find pictures to let other people do the talking Let's start with a little collage I made:

Sandy Koufax on pitching, from Jane Leavy's great book:

"You can't alter what the bones do. If you can make the bones work, the injuries to the soft tissue will be a lot less.

 

The hips get out in front and you create some energy by leaving the upper body behind.

 

The front leg is charged with stopping the torso. When the torso stops, the arm catches. You've now multiplied the force factor. So the arm now developed more speed than it had when it was simply moving with the body. It's the law of the flail. It's somewhere between six and eight to one.

 

[The body] is a two-armed catapult. You try to get the front half out as far as you can. All power pitchers do that…basically, you try and work as much as you can with leverage and weight and energy rather than having to use the force of the muscles to perform those actions that just letting your body get in the right position will take care of. You get the work done by leverage and weight rather than force. You gotta do what the bones do."

Jane Leavy talks about Koufax's delivery further:

The hardest thing in sports is no single act, it is the replication of an act in an endless vacuum of infinite space. That is the ultimate discipline. In biomechanical terms, what made Koufax perfect was the ability to repeat a motion…his acolytes within baseball are noteworthy and numerous…Kevin Brown, John Franco, Orel Hershiser…Kenny Rogers, Nolan Ryan…"This isn't philosophy,” says former major leaguer manager Kevin Kennedy…"It's the way the body works." Or, as Koufax has been known to say, mechanics is what's natural.

 

These are precisely the principles Lincecum's motion is based off of. Leading with the hip, control of the lower body, letting the body and not the muscles work, all of it. I'd guess the reason he doesn't ice or feel much soreness is exactly what Koufax said; letting the bones and the body do the work, alleviating the muscles. How else does a guy who weighed 85 pounds coming into Liberty High School throw in the high 80s, and throw in the low 90's as a 135 pound freshman for UW? Some people's bodies simply can't accommodate the kind of motion that is described, but Lincecum has quite unique control over his body. As noted by Brian Meehan of <em>The Oregonian</em>:

 

He can drive a golf ball 300 yards. He can throw a baseball from the center field fence to home plate, walk on his hands and perform a standing back flip.

Tim, is that true? Lincecum:

"People call me a freak of nature. It's not unusual for me to just start dancing around out of the blue. I like to do back flips and walk around on my hands."

Not bad.

So what do scientists have to say about this according to Leavy?

Today, biomechanical researchers like Jobe's colleague, Dr. Marilyn Pink, use computer-enhanced telemetry to analyze a pitcher's motion. When she performed "qualitative visual analysis" of Koufax's form in her lab at Centinela Hosiptal in Los Angeles, she discovered what batters already knew: He was biomechanically perfect. "There was absolutely not a wasted piece of energy there," Pink concluded. "He knew exactly what was extraneous and what was needed.

More on Koufax from Leavy's book, and tell me if you don't start noticing some comparisons between this and what hitters have been saying about Tim the Enchanter:

The beauty of his delivery was a function of his mechanics and his mechanics were a function of obeying the laws of nature. Every pitch came over the top. He didn't drop down. He didn't come sidearm. He didn't fool around. His fluidity lulled minds and dulled reflexes…No matter how many times a batter saw it, the ball's arrival at home plate always came as a shock. It was a humbling, disorienting sensation. In the immortal words of Willie Stargell, trying to hit Koufax was like "trying to drink coffee with a fork." Hitters talk about it all the time and invariably in the same words. The ball presented itself as an offering. It was right there. I was right on it. And then nope, goodbye, it was gone.

Andy Etchebarren: "And all that is taking place in less than a second. With Koufax, your eyes couldn't tell your brain to react fast enough."

What's that you said about Lincecum again, Ian Stewart?

"He's just a max-effort guy with a really different windup and you can't see the ball at all until it's right on top of you. It gets on you real quick… you only get a very short glance of the ball before it's on you." 

Sounds familiar. Tim McCarver on Koufax: "It was like one muscle throwing the ball."

So am I grasping at straws here comparing this fluid delivery delivery to Koufax's? Let's ask Lincecum and his former coach:

"It's kind of a pinwheel action," Lincecum says in describing his pitching motion. "It's been told to me that [my delivery] is a combination of Kevin Brown and Sandy Koufax.

 

"It's the way I was taught by my father. My feeling is whatever works for me, works for me."

As Koufax says, mechanics are what's natural. Oh, by the way, Lincecum's father could throw 88 at age 55.

"He's really athletic. He really uses his entire body," [UW coach] Knutson said. "His arm really just comes along for the ride. His delivery isn't that unusual, but it is very dynamic. He's got great flexibility."

Another interesting bit comparing Koufax to Lincecum isn't so much the front leg and it's stretch that gets so much attention, but the back leg. Quoth Leavy:

The back leg is the controlling authority, in Koufax's view, "the single most important thing in pitching." …It remains a subject of esoteric debate whether a pitch begins with a push or a controlled fall off the pitching rubber. Koufax pushed…Most pitchers go into their windup with their back foot flat against the rubber, a passive approach. So ingrained is this orthodoxy, it took Hershiser three months pracitcing nothing else to get it right…the difference is as subtle as it is essential. By aligning muscle with bone, stress is minimized, force is maximized, and leverage is increased…Some athletes describe an out-of-body experience at peak performance, a freedom from the bonds of physical activity. Koufax never lost consciousness of where his body was, especially his lower half. He knew that if it hips went where they were supposed to go the rest of the body would follow…his stride was low and lone and exact.

‘ChadBradfordWannabe’ has an excellent analsysis of Lincecum's motion here. He notes:

See how he leads with his butt/hips as he carries his body forward? That's just phenomenal.

In the slows, you'll see that long, low stride, and note that he starts his back foot out already set, like Koufax.

Sounds like exactly what Mr. Koufax himself preaches. I'm worried about this not icing, though. Has anyone ever done it?

Giants trainer Dave Groeschner estimated that less than 10 percent of pitchers decline to ice. Giants left-hander Steve Kline is among the minority who don't wrap their arms after throwing. The same was true of former big-league right-hander Paul Quantrill. It's no coincidence that Quantrill and Kline often battled each other for the major league lead in appearances.

Willie Mays on Koufax: "You know, he only had two pitches…Of course, he threw them very well."

Leavy again:

And he threw them from the same place, same angle, same motion. You didn't know which was which until one went up and the other went down…He never believed in a change of pace. "He didn't have to think too much," Jim bouton concluded after watching him disarm the Bronx Bombers in the 1962 World Series. "He just had to decide whether to throw his overpowering, overwhelming fastball or his off-the-table curveball. The fact that he threw them both with the same grace and same beatuy was hypnotizing. Nobody knew how fast he was."

Maybe it's an okay thing Lincecum has only two pitches? An 80 fastball and an 80 curveball don't require too much of an addition. As for Lincecum's control, I'm not worried. Some say the delivery will make it difficult, but I'd wager Koufax with his control ratio just under 3 and his BB/9 just over that would disagree (and his numbers were much, much better when he stopped getting jerked around). And let’s not forget about the fact Lincecum said he’s been using a changeup more now that wooden bats can’t really deal with it… good luck, NL.

Lincecum's curveball has been described as even better than his fastball. The same was true for Koufax (who kepy his thumb up on all pitches and used the 'karate chop' curve, Doc):

Guys would swing at it like they were chopping wood and end up hitting only the plate. Juan Marichal once broke his bat in half that way…The first time Jimmy Campanis, Al's kid, caught Koufax, he stood up to catch the ball and it hit him in the knees.

Stewart on Tim's curve, which was called the top curve of the draft (complimenting the top fastball):

"His curveball was really good, a good hard-breaking spike curveball. He threw it for a first-pitch strike, a second-pitch strike, a third-pitch strike. You get the idea-he pretty much threw it whenever he wanted to and located it wherever he wanted to."

Then there's the concerns about Lincecum's durability. You might ask… if Koufax's and Lincecum's delivery were so great, then why was Koufax through at age 30? Well, his injury wasn't a tear, but it was a ligament problem, but not in the way you'd expect. His medial collatoral ligament was stretched, which let his bones rub together and owned the cartilage. Doctors have said today Koufax's injury could be fixed with surgery that's relatively commonplace. Furthermore, even durable arms have a limit, and the four man rotation with complete games all the time probably didn't help Koufax. Probably some genetics in there, too… some pitcher's got it, some don't. With Lincecum’s reports on himself, I think he’s got the genetics to avoid injury. As for Koufax's control early on, I won't go into the details, but he was treated pretty poorly and jerked around alot in the first few years (lots of issues with the manager). I highly recommend Leavy's book for more details.

Back to Lincecum. Given this, what are his weaknesses? Well, Noah Lowry says he can't sing worth crap. Guys said Koufax sucked at parking. No one's perfect, I guess…

The Giants players in Spring training enjoyed all these comparisons. As a local paper noted:

Teammates ride Lincecum constantly. They read a recent article that that compared him to Bob Feller and Sandy Koufax — Hall of Famers with similar full-windup, long-stride throwing motions — and took to calling him "Koufax" and "Sandy" and "Feller," along with "Franchise."

Anyhow, as you all know, I'm a huge Giants fan. About the only Dodgers I can respect are Sandy Koufax and Jackie Robinson. The rest all reside in the special place reserved in the Ninth Circle for traitors–traitors to humanity for wearing Dodger blue. Most people don't realize that the Giants are the all-time leading club in wins and Hall of Famers. The 60's should have been their decade. Sandy Koufax was one of the reasons it wasn't. He constantly tormented them, especially in pennant races. This left-handed guy with the amazing fastball and ridiculous curveball had an unprecedented streak of greatness and led the Dodgers to multiple World Series (in which his ERA was under 1.00 in over 60 innings). Sandy Koufax retired in 1966.

Forty one years later, it's time for revenge, and to give the heathens to the south a taste of their own medicine.