Tim Lincecum

… Outfielder Cody Ross, who scored on Edgar Renteria’s decisive three-run homer off Cliff Lee in the seventh inning Monday, said Lincecum seemed normal before the clincher. Normal, that is, for Lincecum; perhaps not for anyone else.

“He was dancing around, singing, doing all his stuff 40 minutes before the game, like he wasn’t pitching,” Ross said. “That’s just how he is. He’s a happy-go-lucky guy, doesn’t let anything affect him. He’s a bulldog, that’s why he did what he did.”

Bulldog was Orel Hershiser’s nickname, and that is Lincecum’s pet, which had the run of the Giants’ clubhouse during the regular season. Lincecum named him Cy and feeds him from a dish in his locker at AT&T Park. Lincecum dresses in the space that once belonged to Barry Bonds, who is largely scorned for his role in baseball’s steroids scandal. Lincecum was charged last off-season with marijuana possession, but that seems to have endeared him even more to certain fans in San Francisco, where a popular T-shirt bears the slogan, “Let Tim Smoke.”

Lincecum earned his nickname, the Freak, for his extraordinary athleticism. He was a quarterback and cornerback in high school, a point guard on the basketball team and a natural at golf. He can walk on his hands and do back flips.

But baseball was his destiny, shaped in the suburbs of Seattle by his father, Chris, who worked for Boeing. Chris built his son’s unusual delivery: back to the plate, glove raised to the sky, then a whirling of hips and a stride, wrote Roger Angell of The New Yorker, like “a January commuter arching over six feet of slush.”

The hitter sees that jumble of moving parts, then must prepare for a riding fastball, a curveball or a slider/changeup that is virtually indistinguishable for much of its flight, the slider tumbling, the changeup fading, both from a similar trajectory and at a similar speed.