OUT OF LEFT FIELD

by DrLefty The Giants' fanbase has a conflicted relationship with Dusty Baker. Some will never get over the Giants' stunning collapse in Games 6-7 of the 2002 World Series, and some still mutter "Salomon Torres" every time they hear Dusty's name. (By the way, Torres...

Buster Posey watches his dramatic grand slam as Reds catcher and future #ForeverGiant Ryan Hanigan turns away in disgust, 10-11-12 in Cincinnati.   by DrLefty On Friday night, after our usual Zoom happy hour call with my mom and siblings and their partners, we...

Mike Yastrzemski would have come up as the tying run if home plate umpire Rob Drake hadn't taken the bat out of Austin Slater's hand and ended the Giants' season.   by DrLefty Last Sunday, just a few hours before the final game of the 2020 regular season, I...

by DrLefty So here we are: last day of the strange, sad 2020 baseball season. Is it the last day of Giants baseball until spring? We'll know in a few hours. I woke up knowing what I wanted to write today, and when I perused the latest comments on the blog, I saw a...

Caleb Baragar holds up his MVP trophy after the Sacramento River Cats win the AAA championship game, Sept. 17, 2019   by DrLefty I'll get to the Giants and their last ten games and playoff chances in a minute, but I thought for this week's column, we'd check in...

by DrLefty In the COVID-19 testing sweepstakes, the Giants got off easy. No multi-player outbreak, like the Marlins and Cardinals had, necessitating multiple roster moves and many doubleheaders. No four-day layoff like the A's had when one of their relievers tested...

by DrLefty After last night's discouraging-but-all-too-familiar loss, Alex Pavlovic said this in his gamer. This was supposed to be a season full of mistakes from young players.   Mauricio Dubon. Jaylin Davis. Joey Bart. Tyler Rogers. Sam Coonrod. Possibly Heliot...

by DrLefty This will be the first and only time you will see a photo of a Dodger (or an actor playing a Dodger) as the "featured image" at the top of an Out of Left Field column. And watching "42," starring Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson, was the first and only...

Rookies Joey Bart and Logan Webb led the way on Friday night. Photo credit: NBC Sports-Bay Area   by DrLefty The Democratic National Convention this week used the slogan "Build Back Better" to talk about the vision that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the...

Eight months ago today, I wrote a column asking whether the "Emperor" (Farhan Zaidi) was "wearing any clothes" (competent to do his job or a big phony). I promised at the end to revisit the question in six months, which for obvious reasons didn't happen, but we'll do...

photo credit: galoremag.com by DrLefty The featured image is from an e-zine directed at young women, and the article is about literally feeling ugly--bad hair days, skin breaking out, jeans not buttoning--you get idea--all at once. When I posted a week ago today, the...

Chadwick Tromp beams after his first major league hit. Photo credit: NBC Sports-Bay Area Full box here by DrLefty It was the first Orange Friday of the 2020 season at Oracle Park in San Francisco, and it arrived on what, in an alternate universe, would have been the...