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DR. LEFTY'S TAKE ON ALL THINGS GIANT
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New Giants and Departed Giants
New Giants pitching prospect Carson Ragsdale, acquired yesterday from the Phillies for reliever Sam Coonrod. He's tall. I have to be honest with y'all. This spring will mark four years of doing weekend posts for TWG, and it has never been harder for me to muster up the energy and concentration for a post than it is today. That is nothing to do with any of you or the Giants but rather the...
Dusty Baker, Game 7 (Round 2) and World Series “Preview”
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...
Sunday Gratitude
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...
2020 Postmortem and Looking Ahead to 2021
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...
Keep Hope Alive
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...
Rookie Year
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...
Play Ball!
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...
Rebuilding, Competing, Both, or Neither?
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...
What a Strange Week
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...
Build Back Better™
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...
The Verdict is In: The Emperor has No Clothes
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...
One Ugly Week
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...
The Wacky, Weird 2020 Giants
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...