Only in the San Francisco Bay Area did the story cross over from the sports pages to the news pages: on October 30, Tim Lincecum, the Giants’ ace right hander, was stopped by a Washington State Highway Patrol officer for driving 74mph on Interstate 5 a few miles north of the Oregon border. He was on his way home to a suburb of Seattle.
The highway patrolman smelled marijuana and Lincecum acknowledged that he had a pipe in the car, and 3.3 grams of bud -about four joints’ worth. Lincecum denied that he had been smoking while driving. The officer wrote him up for speeding and misdemeanor drug possession. A Clark County prosecutor dropped the charge to possession of paraphernalia -an infraction which, unlike drug possession, does not require a mandatory-minimum one day in jail.
A sensible prosecutor named Grant Hansen said that Lincecum had gotten the standard deal offered to cooperative first-time offenders. Henry Shulman of the Chronicle wrote, “Hansen said typically there are 15 to 20 similar cases in his county each week, mostly from young people from the area, and all are treated this way.” The prosecutor put the episode in proper perspective: Tim Lincecum is a young person who did what young people often do.
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