‘Bay Area native’ baseball player who bashed SF is actually from Sacramento

Rowdy Tellez, a career .233 hitter who recently signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates, was asked about Buster Posey’s recent comments about the city during a guest appearance on YouTube baseball show “Foul Territory.” He made it clear he agreed with the sentiment.

“For me, the city, man, it’s bad,” Tellez said on Thursday. “I grew up going to Giants games, we grew up taking BART into the city, it was fine. But the last 10-12 years, man, it’s just been a bad city. It’s not nice anymore. It’s not clean. It’s not safe.”

The “Foul Territory” show’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, originally shared the clip in a post that called Tellez a “Bay Area native.” Only Tellez is actually born in Sacramento and raised in Elk Grove, about 100 miles east of San Francisco. Tellez tried to make that distinction clear, saying he lived “kinda” close when asked if he was a Bay native and saying that he grew up “sub-two hours from there.” The show seemed to finally realize the mistake late on Thursday afternoon, deleting the original post and sharing the clip again, but this time describing Tellez as “from Sacramento.”

But that clearly doesn’t change his views of the city by the Bay, which align with what MLB insider Ken Rosenthal said on the exact same show on Wednesday.

“They’ve got a geography problem, or a city problem, I guess I would say,” Rosenthal said on Wednesday. “Players, for whatever reason, have a negative perception of San Francisco right now. Not all players, of course — Jung-hoo Lee didn’t have one — but they’re running into this, Posey said that.”

Whether this sentiment is true or not for players who actually play for the Giants also doesn’t seem to matter, either. Tellez said that the only Giants player he knows is J.D. Davis, his teammate from Elk Grove High School, and that Davis “seems to like” playing in the city. Logan Webb himself added his own comment on this regard on Thursday, posting, “A lot of people that have never played in SF seem to know a lot about it.” Webb added a second remark, too: “Have been to 29 other cities there’s a lot of poo poo on most of those streets.”

Posey’s comments shouldn’t be taken as gospel that the doom loop actually exists, but rather that the sentiment is permeating the national media. That was the takeaway from Andrew Baggarly, the reporter at The Athletic whose conversation with Posey rekindled this trope all over again.

“This is what frustrated Buster Posey when he spoke to me,” Baggarly posted. “San Francisco has very real problems, like every American city, but the perception is so overblown (intentionally, by some) compared to the reality. And too many baseball players have bought into those perceptions.”

Tellez will get a chance to see San Francisco in its current state for himself when the Pirates come to Oracle Park on April 26-28.