Then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom warms up before the All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game, held ahead of the All-Star Game in San Francisco, on July 8, 2007. For their 2004 home opener, the San Francisco Giants invited a special guest to throw the ceremonial first pitch: Gavin Newsom, then just a few months into his first term as mayor of San Francisco.
Twenty years later, as the Giants kick off their latest home season Friday, Newsom is now a national political figure — not just an. He regularly appears on cable news to discuss California policies and attack Republicans. Lately he has traveled the country as a leading surrogate for President Biden’s re-election campaign.
Mike Cummins, the assistant coach at Santa Clara while Newsom was there, said the governor has “embellished his baseball career a little bit at times.” “He didn’t earn it. He didn’t earn the right to say it,” said Kevin Schneider, who pitched for two seasons and now runs a pitching academy in San Francisco. “I worked my ass off. So did everyone else on that team. For him to just go all these years, to say he did something he didn’t that takes not just talent but also dedication and effort and sacrifice, it’s not right.”
“He chooses to talk about the emotional side of it, because he thinks that is the place that young people in particular, who are going through struggles, people with dyslexia, can find themselves in his story,” Click said. “That matters way more than, you know, whether he was a rostered player or what his stats were in the fall ball, JV, freshman year, Santa Clara University season.
Newsom headed down the Peninsula to Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit college where he was a freshman in the fall of 1985. Having struggled in high school, with a reported SAT score of 960 out of 1600, Newsom has long Alongside then-head coach John Oldham, who died in February, Cummins eventually visited Newsom at home and recruited him to Santa Clara. The team had a junior varsity squad at the time, which it used as a “minor league,” Cummins said, so Newsom had a guaranteed spot in the program, but would have to perform well enough to play in varsity games.
To report this story, CalMatters reached out to coaches and teammates listed on the Broncos rosters for the 1986 and 1987 seasons. They said Newsom played only during the fall tryout periods of his freshman and sophomore years, when prospective players trained and rotated into practice games against other local universities, and no official statistics were kept.