Pirates slugger with no ties to SF shares absurd opinions on "bad city"

Elk Grove High School graduate and new Pittsburgh Pirate Rowdy Tellez weighed in on San Francisco crime.

Buster Posey said that he thought "uneasiness" with San Francisco hindered the SF Giants' pursuit of Shohei Ohtani. Even if Posey's comments were off base, it sparked a mini media fire storm. For his show "Foul Territory TV," host and necklace enthusiast Scott Braun decided to ask a guy who grew up 100 miles away from the city for his thoughts.

Rowdy Tellez is a Sacramento native, Elk Grove High School graduate, and career .233 hitter who recently signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates. But he's basically a Bay Area native, because as he says, he's "two hours away." Tellez weighed in on the decline of San Francisco, though acknowledging that his high school teammate J.D. Davis "seems to like it."

"For me, the city, man, it's just bad," the articulate Tellez told Braun. "We grew up taking BART into the city and all that. The last ten years, it's just been a bad city. It's not nice anymore. It's not clean. It's hardly safe."

Tellez didn't acknowledge that he didn't know about "the baseball side," but explained that the team was less appealing to free agents on the baseball side without stars like Posey and Madison Bumgarner.

Of course, it's hard to take Tellez as an expert, because in the ten-year period he's noticed the decline of San Francisco, he's played in:

- Michigan

- West Virginia

- Florida

- Arizona

- New Hampshire

- Buffalo, NY

- Toronto

- Milwaukee

Missing from that list are San Francisco and Oakland. It's hard to imagine Tellez has much firsthand experience with the City by the Bay in the last decade.  Also Tellez thinks you can take BART from Elk Grove to San Francisco, so his credentials as a geographer and urban chronicler are suspect.

It sounds more like Tellez has absorbed the media portrayal of San Francisco as a high-crime area, a portrait largely driven by the recall of former district attorney Chesa Boudin. The majority of the pro-recall funding came from a single Political Action Committee called Neighbors For A Better San Francisco, who got over $600K from billionaire Republican mega-donor William Oberndorf. Oberndorf had donated over $11 million to Republican candidates since 2011.

But in reality, San Francisco has a far lower rate of violent crime than it did when Tellez and his family were allegedly taking BART to Giants games - 25% less than in 2006. Among large cities, SF's violent crime rate is 636 per 100,00 residents, lower than such hotbeds of crime as Indianapolis, Charlotte, and Seattle, with half as much violent crime as Houston, a city rarely cited as a dangerous.

For comparison, the violent crime rate of Sacramento, a city that's actually close to Tellez's hometown of Elk Grove, is 674 per 100,00 residents. Granted, Shohei Ohtani doesn't want to live in Sacramento either.

We don't know Tellez's politics, even if his facial hair and general demeanor suggest that he's in favor of stopping the steal. That's both in the ballpark, where he has three stolen bases in 533 career games, and perhaps in the 2020 presidential election as well.

Ohtani chose to stay in Los Angeles, which also has a higher crime rate than San Francisco. Opposing fans have been beaten in Dodger Stadium's parking lot and been stabbed elsewhere in the city - it doesn't seem to affect their free-agent chances. We're not even saying that Los Angeles is unsafe, but it's bizarre that San Francisco has such a statistically-unfounded reputation.

Some of that comes from a whipped-up panic about retail theft from 2021. A year later, the chief financial officer of Walgreens admitted that the company had "mischaracterized" how much theft had actually occurred and "cried too much last year." But that admission didn't get nearly the press that the hysterical San Francisco shoplifting stories did. 

The lamenting about the city's appeal to free agents ignores that the Giants actually did land a big free agent a year ago. They just chose to fail his physical. Would we still be hearing about how the homeless were scaring off MLB All-Stars if the Giants had just signed Carlos Correa to a 13-year contract? Sadly, we probably would.

One of the players behind "Foul Territory TV" is former SF Giants catcher A.J. Pierzynski, who joined the team after a disastrous trade in 2004 and promptly grounded into more double plays than anyone in baseball. Pierzynski also once kneed the team trainer in the groin for the crime of asking A.J. if he was OK after taking a foul ball to his own groin.

So if Scott Braun wants to learn more about violent crime in San Francisco, he can ask his boss about Stan Conte. And if he wants to learn about getting from Elk Grove to Oracle Park in a three-hour and 35-minute commute on public transportation, he can ask Tellez.