Bill Conlin: A massacre of baseball's records

THERE IS A SCENE in "The Godfather" where Vito Corleone has just called in the favor owed him by Amerigo Bonasero, the undertaker. He is to use all his powers to make the ambushed Sonny presentable for a traditional "family" viewing. He draws back the sheet covering his son and sobs for the only time in the film.

The Godfather says, "Look how they massacred my boy . . . "

That weird and disconnected image popped into my head when the BBWAA announced yesterday that Giants contortionist and party animal Tim Lincecum has won his second straight NL Cy Young Award. Not too shabby when you consider the undersized contradiction of everything scouts look for in a righthander has now won it twice in his three big-league seasons.

This time he did it with 15 victories - 15-7 to be exact - 2 days after Kansas City righthander Zack Greinke won the AL Cy with 16 Ws. Greinke had just tied D'Backs 2006 winner Brandon Webb (more on him later) for the fewest victories in a full regular season by a Cy Young winner. Well, records were made to be broken, right? And Lincecum greased under the Webb-Greinke bottom shelf in the pantheon of pitching paucity.

I pictured Bud Selig whipping a mortician's sheet off a record book that has become as riddled as the .44 caliber corpse of Sonny Corleone. Records sundered by the move from the 154-game schedule to 162 . . . Pages mutilated by the needle-tracks of the Steroid Era, a huge spike that began with the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa andro-a-andro and went from the suspiciously sublime to the no-doubt-about-it ridiculous when Barry Bonds turned baseball's toughest home run park into the Pac Bell phone booth . . . And now that the postseason has been extended to a possible 19 games for the World Series survivors, Mr. October has become Mr. Octember. Those Series records set before the Pastime went the best-of-5 LCS format, to best-of-7 and, finally, to the best-of-5 division series are now stale toast.

All of it meanders over so much down time to accommodate a second-tier cable network that the Phillies actually had to play a simulated game to keep the lads sharp for the NLCS. The Yankees' 15-game march to a 27th World Series title was spread over 29 days. Hell, Joe Girardi might have been able to get away with a two-man rotation if TBS and Fox had decreed a few more lay days to prop up their sagging ratings.