Lincecum’s mechanics—raw grace optimized by science and practice—put him in the company of a few athletes, such as Tiger Woods, who command our attention through the beauty of their movement. The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Beauty is not easy to define, particularly in an age that resists it as simplistic and sentimental. The writer Karrie Jacobs has suggested that in architecture it involves the element of surprise, the unanticipated encounter that gives unexpected pleasure and delight." This holds true for baseball as well. Tim Lincecum’s meticulously engineered pitch, created to trick a batter into swinging at thin air, unfolds in a matter of seconds into something entirely unexpected for us too. As he winds up and fires off the baseball, sports transforms before our eyes into something very much like art.