San Fran Mayor Could've Been a Player

Gavin Newsome is one the nation's youngest, most ambitious and -- perhaps most notably -- most unabashedly liberal mayors. He's hoping that within a year, he may be one of the nation's most unabashedly liberal governors. Well, it turns out that at one point in time, he was a pretty good high school baseball player. Good enough, even to get attention from scouts representing the Rangers and Dodgers.

Evidently, Newsom made it perfectly clear that he had no designs on playing in the major leagues, so teams backed off before drafting him. Yet that does little to minimize his talent at the prep level. Despite reports to the contrary from TIME -- as first pointed out by the San Francisco Chronicle's City Insider blog -- Newsom was never drafted by the Rangers, but he did in fact accept a partial baseball scholarship to attend Santa Clara, where he eventually gained enough business acumen to become an entrepreneur of enotecas, selling wine in Northern California at such a successful rate that he eventually became a millionaire. And then, not too long thereafter, became the mayor of San Francisco.

Maybe the Giants could use his services? Actually, maybe they should stay away. After all, in his last public appearance with at-bats, Newsom didn't do so hot.