Tim Lincecum, who will be starting for the San Francisco Giants tonight against Oliver Perez at Shea Stadium in the first of a three game set, has a beautiful pitching motion, like something from an old newsreel. He peers in toward the catcher, his hands set just above his belt, pivots back on his right foot, spins around with his back to home plate at a three-quarters angle and his arm locked low behind him, and kicks his left leg in a three-part stutter. Just as his leg lands, his arm comes all the way over the top, completing a full rotation across and around his body, the ball violently exploding from somewhere within all the moving parts and angles just at the point when he transfers his weight from one foot to the other, so that it seems that he’s almost floating just at the point of release, a moment of complete stillness in the midst of chaos.

The more often you watch it, the less sense this motion makes. It’s so unusual that it must, it seems, be a sleight-of-hand or an illusion of some sort, but it really isn’t. Lincecum throws a 98 mph fastball and an even better curveball, and he can place them anywhere he wants. No one who does that needs to contort himself into a moving piece of Cubism to get hitters out. He may need to do so in order to generate the strength to throw those pitches — the man is, after all, listed at 5-foot-10 and 160 pounds — but it’s clear that his success isn’t based on deception.

Lincecum enters tonight’s game with a 2–0 record and 3.08 ERA in the majors, having thrown 26.1 innings in which he’s struck out 25, walked eight, and allowed three home runs. Relative to his own standards, this is a catastrophe. He was drafted last June out of the University of Washington, where he won the Golden Spikes Award, given every year to the best college player in the country. He signed quickly, and between last July and the end of April threw 62.2 minor league innings, in which he allowed 26 hits and 23 walks while striking out 104. Really the impressive thing about Lincecum is what he does on the mound, not how.

Being impressive, though, is not the same as being interesting, and the reason Lincecum has become a star in less than a month in the majors is that he’s interesting. Baseball employs several hundred pitchers who are indistinguishably tall and square-jawed and deliver their pitches with calm, efficient, Clemensesque motions, and every year a few of them come up to the majors and spend a month pitching as well as Lincecum has without garnering any particular attention. There’s no mystery in Lincecum’s sudden ascension — everyone likes seeing something out of the ordinary. Dontrelle Willis and Justin Verlander are two pitchers who were similarly lauded in recent years for being both effective and unorthodox.

Beyond the novelty of a pitcher with an unusual technique, though, or the aesthetic appeal of a good style, there’s a further appeal to a young, unorthodox pitcher, which is that it preserves the illusion that baseball is a sport that rewards the individual talent, something really very central to its appeal. The lasting myths of other team sports have to do, not exclusively but generally, with team discipline and subordination to order: Michael Jordan becoming a champion by learning how to play within the triangle, for instance. Baseball’s greatest myths, from Babe Ruth to the left fielder playing behind Lincecum, revolve entirely around individual achievement and personal style.

While baseball is still a sport that revolves around one-on-one matchups and is thus resistant to the sort of industrialization you see in football, where the coach can be a more significant force than anyone actually playing the game, it still becomes more standardized every year. There’s nothing wrong with this — it’s the result of evolution, play becoming more homogenous over time as players and coaches adopt strategies, and techniques that have proven over many years to be effective — but there is still a dreariness that sets in when you see the dozens of generic pitchers pitching the way Clemens, Ryan, and Seaver did.

A pitcher like Lincecum offers the promise of something else. His very presence on a major league mound promotes the idea that the solitary genius can stubbornly resist becoming exactly like everyone else, and in doing so, thus vanquish the idea that baseball is doomed to joylessness. Lincecum is not alone, but he’s so unorthodox, and he’s been so successful, that right now he represents that idea as much as anyone playing.

The Giants, who have been reduced to a clown show by Barry Bonds’s grim quest to break Hank Aaron’s record for career home runs before he gets indicted for perjury or tax evasion, can at times represent baseball at its worst. The notion of Lincecum facing off against the absolutely unconscious Oliver Perez, though, represents it at something closer to its best.

tmarchman@nysun.com