This was my outfit: black dress shoes, black slacks, black button-up shirt and a red tie. It was not an abysmal attempt at looking suave at prom (although that’s another story for another time). For nearly a year, it was what I wore to work every day. In 2007, I worked at TGI Fridays on Foothill Drive in Salt Lake City. It was my part-time job while I was a student at the University of Utah. I was 20 then, and thus unable to serve alcohol, so I was a host.
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Utah football players were regulars. Former Jazz head coach Ty Corbin and his family, too. You don’t really ever forget your first job in food service. (That movie “Waiting,” with Ryan Reynolds and Justin Long? It’s disturbingly spot on — so much so that it’s frightening, actually.) The restaurant building is gone now, rebuilt into a series of smaller commercial stores.
Back then, I was a very average college student with even more average grades and zero clue about my future. Having grown up a San Francisco Giants fan, I would spend as much time in the computer labs reading gamers and blogs as I would on projects. And back then, I was a regular reader of “Extra Baggs,” the in-depth blog created by Andrew Baggarly, who was then covering the Giants for the Bay Area News Group. This is not blatant ageism, Baggs, I promise.
Sure enough, when Baggs wrote about his favorite player he ever covered on the Giants weeks ago, it was, guess who. My favorite athlete of all time.
Some memories, for whatever reason, embed forever. One that never left me was watching Tim Lincecum’s major-league debut on May 6, 2007, while I was working a shift at Fridays. It was a Sunday night. Sunday nights in Salt Lake were hit or miss. There were regular bar patrons gnawing on chicken wings and downing PBR. Sometimes huge parties rolled in, but rarely did the floor get overrun. We had a couple of old, grainy TVs near the bar. Looking back, I was a terrible host that night. I would make excuses to walk back to the busing station to make sure we were stocked up on everything and get conveniently distracted.
The 2007 season was like most of the lost Giants seasons. The franchise was allowing an elongated swan song for Barry Bonds as he stalked Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record. There was no realistic chance of a playoff berth. The Giants finished 20 games below .500 that year. Even in early May, you knew the entire season was about seeing Bonds swing for the fences. It was Groundhog Day of the previous few years.
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The silver lining was being able to hear Duane Kuiper scream his patented home run call, “High drive … right field … outta here!”
Bonds hit No. 756 in August. He hit six more that season. It was his last. Lincecum’s May call-up signaled the start of a franchise-wide changeup from an undersized kid throwing smoke. And with that meant uncertainty, and that’s what you wanted. You wanted to get irrationally stoked about a 5-foot-11, 170-pound kid who looked like he was simulating the Ardha Chandrasana yoga pose when he strode so ridiculously far forward off the mound.
No. 55 took the mound in San Francisco on May 6 and I was about 750 miles away wearing that same god-awful getup, leaning up against the bar. In the top of the first inning, Jimmy Rollins singled up the middle on Lincecum, and seven pitches into his major-league career, Lincecum was taken deep to right by Shane Victorino. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because what came next: swing-and-miss strikeouts of Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Aaron Rowand. (A walk to Pat Burrell in the middle, but never let the facts get in the way of a good story, which Lincecum was for nine years with the Giants.)
It was a normal Sunday night at TGI Fridays, and anything but for my team inside the best ballpark in baseball. It was the night a fan base fell for the skinny kid from Washington, whose absurd acrobatic delivery looked like it pulled every possible muscle in his contorting body when he eventually hurled the ball toward home plate. He was our Nuke LaLoosh. Lincecum’s debut against the Phillies: 4 1/3 innings, five hits, five earned runs, five walks and five strikeouts, a LaLooshian stat line identical to one uttered by Teddy, the Durham Bulls’ play-by-play voice in “Bull Durham.”
When I think of why Lincecum is my all-time favorite player, I think about that night at work. If it was any other pitcher making their debut in the show, maybe I don’t avoid my duties as often as I did that night. The special ones make you remember where you were, and in my case, why they were just so fixating that you forget to seat the right section on a slow Sunday night.
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I got to see Lincecum pitch live a couple of times during his peak, when he evolved into the two-time Cy Young winner, four-time All-Star, ace of a staff and an eventual postseason bullpen aficionado as he keyed, in his own way, a run toward three World Series titles in five years. Timmy was the reason I grew my hair out for the first time. The flow under the cap was majestic. He was, also in his own way, a bit anarchistic to the norms of baseball. Everything he did was different, and in a city like San Francisco, that’ll play. It’ll play forever. Before Stephen Curry became the unexpected face of Bay Area sports, it was Lincecum, the twisty, twirly flamethrower, who transitioned a fan base from the home-run chasing era to that of ungodly vanishing split-finger fastballs and double-digit strikeout games.
Every Timmy start became a meme of sorts on Twitter. Every start was “Happy Lincecum Day” from the fans and even beat writers. You knew you were in for something unique. To be different is to stand out, and everything about Lincecum was different, from his windup to his delivery, to his ability, to his persona, to, as chronicled by Baggs in his recent piece, transparent. Timmy was the guy who you’d love to stand next to at a concert. He’d improve the vibe.
Happy Lincecum Day. pic.twitter.com/ju48DuChGu
— Andrew Baggarly (@extrabaggs) May 6, 2016
Two years after watching his debut at work, my family had four tickets to go see the Giants face the San Diego Padres on Sept. 8, 2009, at AT&T Park. Lincecum was scheduled to pitch. He was 13-5 at that point in the year and was on track to win his second consecutive Cy Young. But a sore back forced the Giants to scratch him from the lineup. The team called up a left-hander from Double A. His name was Madison Bumgarner. I wasn’t there for the start of Timmy’s great reign, but I was on hand for Bumgarner’s intro, and it came because Timmy’s back acted up.
I think about that a lot.
(Photo of Lincecum in 2010: Doug Pensinger / Getty Images)
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