Newsom's "Field of Schemes" Stolen Athletic Valor
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If baseball got him into college because his grades and SATs sucked, why is he not on the official Santa Rosa all-time baseball roster, below?
Why can't John Savage, the current UCLA baseball coach whose time at Santa Clara University overlapped with Newsom's, remember him playing baseball at all?
We investigated this go-to Newsom fabrication in our book, ??Fool's Gold??, and provide the receipts.
The entire Newsom narrative about pulling himself up by his cleat laces is a myth:
--Over the last THREE DECADES, Newsom has claimed to be a baseball high school standout who managed to win a partial althetic scholarship to Santa Clara University, a well-regarded small Jesuit liberal arts school in the heart of what is now Silicon Valley.
--In California, Newsom’s claims that he was scouted by the Texas Rangers, a major league franchise George W. Bush would go on to own has been repeated so often it’s morphed into an urban legend in San Francisco. In a 2004 home opener, the San Francisco Giants invited Newsom, then the city’s newly minted mayor to throw out the first pitch, As he took the mound, the announcer stated that Newsom had “played first base for the University of Santa Clara and was drafted by the Texas Rangers.”
--And Newsom continues to mislead and embellish his claims that his high school baseball skills got him into Santa Clara University despite bad grades and SAT scores. He used the same lines during his recent podcasts -- even the one with Charlie Kirk
--He fails to mention, while playing up his baseball admission, however, that he had a personal letter of recommendation from none other than former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who had finished serving his first tenure as governor two years prior, accompanied his 1985 application to the school.
--Those famous political and moneyed San Francisco connections also played a key role in getting Newsom on the university’s JV baseball team, where he played for one season before getting hurt and dropping off the team and heading out for a semester in Europe to clear his head.
-When Crabtree contacted Santa Clara University, where Newsom graduated from, there were no records or photos of him playing on any of the school’s baseball teams.
-That’s because he only played on the JV team as a freshman and then dropped off the team, and the university’s athletic division didn’t keep any photos of JV teams at the time.
-Newsom’s assistant baseball coach at Santa Clara University who now is the head baseball coach at Cal State University, East Bay, told Susan Crabtree, that Newsom was a left-handed pitcher and first baseman on the JV team as a freshman.
"Then he got hurt, I can't remember what the exact injury was, and then he just decided not to play anymore."
-Cummins said he remembered that Newsom was connected "to some alums," including William Connolly, who played for the Santa Clara baseball team in the early 1960s and went on to become a wealthy San Francisco banker who had ties to Newsom’s father.
Crabtree asked Coach Cummins if he remembers him having a baseball scholarship of any kind.
-Cummins responded: "I do not remember that, okay? Because he came from -- obviously, you know his history -- he came from wealth."
"And the alums that were pushing us to take him or recruit him were very tied into that group, and, obviously, as a private school in Santa Clara, that was a huge part of keeping donors happy."
--Then Cummins said this: "I've heard him speak a few times and he kind of embellishes his time [playing baseball at Santa Clara]." Cummins also remembers there were some baseball star alums, such as John Savage, the current UCLA baseball coach who played two years for the Cincinnati Reds, whose time at Santa Clara University overlapped with Newsom but they couldn't remember him playing baseball at all.
"They would call me, you know, when he became governor because he would talk about being on the team, and they couldn't remember him playing at all," Cummins recalled. "And I would tell them, yes, he was on the team, but he was on the javees so they never really bonded with him or whatever."
Tom |
