The San Diego School of Baseball was backed by hitting stars such as Tony Gwynn and Alan Trammell, but it was the pitching minds that gave the early 1980s baseball camp its charm — and its legacy.

Brent Strom and Tom House had been teammates at the University of Southern California and then, later, journeyman pitchers in the major leagues. Aside from lineage, they also shared deep-seated hunches that there was more to learn about baseball than previous generations had taught.

So when the day’s instruction was over, they sat in the dugouts of Grossmont College or ventured to a local watering hole, tossing ideas back and forth: the things they loved about the game, the things they thought were wrong, the things they wanted to change.

Once, during a baby shower for another coach’s wife, the men were scolded when they were found in the corner of a room, playing back film of pitchers. They were all obsessives, and the San Diego School of Baseball was their offseason oasis — a place where they could gather and discuss, without judgment and scorn, some of the very concepts that decades later would alter the balance of baseball.

“A summit,” House called it, “of smart baseball minds.”

Before PITCHf/x and Statcast could measure progress, before internet message boards and…

SAN DIEGO — Mike Yastrzemski is breathless with excitement. He spent months awaiting this day. He is ready to celebrate a new beginning.

The San Francisco Giants’ season opener against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park? Well, sure. Yastrzemski hasn’t taken a single moment of his major-league life for granted. He stood on the chalk line for the anthem, made a couple of running catches in right field, batted fifth in the lineup against Padres right-hander Yu Darvish, watched teammate Jung Hoo Lee collect his first big-league hit and RBI, and soaked up his fifth Opening Day start in a Giants uniform.

Then Yastrzemski raced back to San Francisco for an even more important Opening Day. He and his wife, Paige, are scheduled to induce labor Friday.

“This being our second, hopefully we can convince them we’re capable of taking care of a child and get out of there quickly,” Yastrzemski said. “Hopefully I’ll be back after a couple days.”

You cannot tell much of anything about a person on the first day of their life. You cannot gauge what kind of personality they will exhibit or what interests they will follow, whether they will snort when they laugh or whether they’ll prefer cake to pie. You only hope that they arrive healthy and with no complications. The rest is a…

The Hall of Fame is made for players like Adrián Beltré. As a pure hitter, reliable slugger and slick third baseman, Beltré had few peers: No other infielder in the history of baseball has 3,000 hits, 400 homers and five Gold Glove awards. Beltré, now 44, was a lock for the Hall of Fame.

As a first-time Cooperstown candidate, Beltré did not need to follow the breathless tracking of public ballots this winter. Yet he still could not feel secure, he said, until his wife and son assured him on Tuesday that election day looked promising. He could savor it.

“That made me relax a little bit more, and I kind of forced myself to try to enjoy this moment,” Beltré said from his home in Southern California, moments after achieving his sport’s greatest honor. “It was going to be a nice moment, and probably the last moment in baseball that I was going to accomplish, being at the pinnacle of the game.”

Beltré had company at the summit on Tuesday, with Todd Helton and Joe Mauer joining him in the new class of Hall of Famers. Former manager Jim Leyland, elected by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee last month, will also be inducted at the ceremony July 21.

Candidates must receive 75 percent of the ballots from 10-year members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of…

BURLINGAME, Calif. — Encircled by 30 or so teenage girls in the end zone of a high school practice field, Pam Baker provides the game plan for the day, breaks down the huddle and sends her charges to position-specific training stations.

From there, the Northern California former businesswoman and mother of two roams the field. She keeps a watchful eye on the instruction and action on this third day of her flag football clinic at Burlingame High School, just outside of San Francisco. Baker ensures that her coaches are adequately supported, and remains alert for any issues with athletes that may require one-on-one attention.

Yet she later declares about herself: “I’m no coach.”

You’d never know by watching and listening to her operate. And those closest to the 55-year-old Baker insist her denial couldn’t be further from the truth.

Four years ago, Baker never envisioned venturing into this world. She enjoyed a successful career in the healthcare marketing industry, and the closest she came to athletics involved sitting in the stands while her husband, Doug, coached their twin daughters.

Then tragedy rocked Baker’s world: In 2020, Doug died of pancreatic cancer at age 52. Wanting to find a way to honor Doug’s legacy, Pam left her marketing job in pursuit of a new…

SAN FRANCISCO — Patrick Bailey stopped himself in mid-sentence.

He was spending his first day as a big-league ballplayer. He met with reporters in the Giants dugout prior to Friday night’s game. He was asked: After you got the good news, who was the first person you called? Bailey started to answer. He called Giants bullpen coach and catching coordinator Craig Albernaz … but only after he tracked down his wife, Leigha, so he could tell her in person.

“Don’t worry,” Bailey said. “I didn’t mess up.”

Albernaz might not be a member of Bailey’s immediate family, but he’s been there from the start. And Bailey has been there from the very start for Albernaz, too. Bailey began his pro career in 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which wiped out his junior season at North Carolina State and then, after getting drafted in the first round (13th overall), put him in the unique circumstance of being in a quarantine bubble as a taxi-squad player at the alternate site. The 2020 season also marked a strange start for manager Gabe Kapler and his coaching staff, Albernaz included, as their inaugural season in San Francisco turned into a distilled 60 game-season played out in front of cardboard cutouts instead of living, breathing fans.

“We talk about it all the…

At about 2 a.m on Dec. 7, a weary Aaron Judge completed his second flight in a 24-hour span, with a third coming up just a few hours later. He had traveled from Tampa to San Diego to Stockton, Calif., 20 minutes from his home in Linden. And upon landing in Stockton, a career-altering text message appeared on his phone.

While on vacation in Italy, New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner had composed a long message to the American League MVP, asking if they could talk. Steinbrenner, knowing Judge was closing in on his free-agent decision, wanted to make his intentions absolutely clear.

Judge was with his wife, Samantha, and miniature dachshund, Penny. He and Samantha were dropping the dog off at Judge’s parents at Linden, then leaving on a 7 a.m. flight from Sacramento to Maui. So much was happening, both with his travels and at the winter meetings in San Diego. Before calling Steinbrenner, Judge wanted to formulate a game plan. He phoned his agents, Page Odle and Dave Matranga of PSI Sports Management. The moment of truth in Judge’s suspenseful, month-long spin through free agency had arrived.

A dozen people close to the negotiations, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly, detailed the final, frantic hours leading to Judge’s nine-year, $360 million…

Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences. Now, always and forever. There’s a reason why it’s not the Theory of Unintended Consequences. That’s because it’s a law, proven, immutable and inescapable.

The law doesn’t have to come with negative consequences. When I dropped out of college at the age of 21, I moved home and met my future wife. “Let that be a lesson to you: The only reason that you’re alive is that I dropped out of college, racked up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and broke your grandparents’ hearts,” I’ll tell my daughters as I’m tucking them in. “And don’t you forget it.”

But there will always be unintended consequences that come with every decision, every change. So it goes with the pitch clock, which is the talk of baseball right now. Before the weekend, I considered myself an expert on what would happen after the pitch clock was implemented. After the weekend, I’m lighting votive candles and apologizing to the Gods of Unintended Consequences for my arrogance. For there was something that I completely forgot to consider, and I hate it.

First, my credentials: Back in 2017, I found two eerily similar games that happened two decades apart, and I watched each one of them with a stopwatch and a notebook. I wanted to figure…

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Brett Wisely guesses he was 6 or 7 years old the first time his dad took him to work. The “mid-watch” shift started at 11 p.m. and ended at 8 the following morning.

“I think I fell asleep as soon as I got there,” Wisely said.

Better son than father. Bob Wisely was an air traffic controller. His office was the tower at Jacksonville International Airport. He’s retired now, along with his wife, Kelly, who also worked as an air traffic controller in the Navy and saw the world from the deck of aircraft carriers.

“Honestly, that’s the route I was thinking about taking,” said Wisely, “but I’m pretty happy with where I’m at.”

Wisely is in major-league camp with the Giants, and while he’s a long shot to make the opening-day roster, he is on a final approach to make his major-league debut at some point this season. He and Isan Díaz, a fellow left-handed hitting middle infielder, are on the 40-man roster. And even though the Giants are set with shortstop Brandon Crawford and second baseman Thairo Estrada, there will be times when the active roster needs more left-handed balance, more coverage up the middle, or both.

At minimum, Wisely and Díaz should get the level of exposure that the Giants gave over the past two seasons to Jason Vosler, who…