Something that comes ‘out of left field’ arrives with no warning at all: a question nobody saw coming, an offer from a stranger, a plot twist. The related form ‘out in left field’ describes a person rather than an event, and is less kind. Someone who is out in left field is eccentric, mistaken or simply out of touch, with the softer ‘way out in left field’ reserved for the truly detached.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘out of left field’?
The phrase is American and comes from baseball, where left field is one of the three outfield positions. Why left field rather than right is the awkward part, and no explanation has been proved. The most sober suggestion, offered by the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, is that the throw from deep left field to first base or home plate is one of the longest on the diamond, so a runner put out by it has been caught by something distant and unforeseen.
The printed record starts earlier than the reference books once suggested. Random House dates ‘out in left field’, meaning nonsensical or out of touch, to the 1930s, with ‘out of left field’, meaning out of the blue, following in the 1940s. But the baseball researcher Ken Liss has found the figurative sense in the Boston Herald of 8 October 1919, where the sports editor Burt Whitman described a confused baserunner as ‘out in left field’ and glossed it as “the latest slang expression for any one who is loose in the coco”. Days later a Lowell Sun columnist had his thoughts “way out in left field” while walking home, so the metaphor was already loose in New England by the end of 1919. The ‘unexpected’ sense grew up in the American music trade, where a surprise hit was ‘a hit out of left field’; the music historian Arnold Shaw described that usage in 1949, and Billboard was printing it by 1943.
Two folk theories circulate. One holds that at the Chicago Cubs’ old West Side Grounds a mental hospital stood beyond left field, so patients’ shouts made ‘out in left field’ mean crazy; a plaque at the site says as much. In fact the neighbouring institution was a general county hospital, and the phrase is not found in Chicago papers until decades after the ballpark closed in 1915. The other claims left field seats were shunned at Yankee Stadium because Babe Ruth played right field. Ruth joined the Yankees in 1920, a year after the phrase was already in print, which settles that one. For a milder baseball borrowing, compare ‘ballpark figure’.