Tim Lincecum Diagnosed With Degenerative Hips

Tim Lincecum hasn’t pitched since he took a liner off the forearm during a start on June 27, and now it’s looking like he’s going to have even more trouble getting back on the field. After receiving an MRI on Monday, doctors found what Giants head coach Bruce Bochy referred to as “degenerative things” in both of Lincecum’s hips.

Lincecum got a cortisone shot in both hips and will try to resume throwing in a few days, and the team seems to think that the problem will be manageable and not necessarily career ending. This is a big-time bummer for anyone who’s ever enjoyed watching Tim Lincecum pitch, a group which should include everyone who’s ever had a passing interest in baseball because Tim Lincecum is awesome and cool.

This is also feels like a very Tim Lincecum-y thing to happen to Tim Lincecum, whose career has been derailed so completely by a series of undefined calamities that broke him as a pitcher, but not so much that he couldn’t get back on the mound every fifth day. This is a guy who spent the first five years of his career as one of the best pitchers in baseball, and the last three as one of the very worst. And yet he’s kept going out there, logging his starts and taking his beatings and never quite succumbing all the way to whatever problems robbed him of his abilities. Part of me thinks it’s cool that he’s kept pitching all this time, and part of me wishes he’d just broken more completely and had the chance to bounce back after some surgeries and a year off. Anyway, baseball is mean and it sucks that Lincecum has this latest problem to deal with.

[ Mercury News]