"out of left field" (Why "left"?)

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:58 AM -0500 2/28/01, Bruce Dykes wrote:
>As I learned it, I was told that baseballs get hit to left field
>infrequently, so you stick your weakest fielder there.
>
>So, you have:
>
>a) a rare event
>b) a place to stick unwanted people
>and c) the odd instance of a ball being hit to left field, and your weakest
>player getting the ball and successfully throwing it in for an out...
>
Actually, the weakest player in sandlot and amateur ball is usually
put in RIGHT field, since it's rare that a team will have a
left-handed power hitter strong enough to pull the ball to right. At
all levels of baseball, a lot more balls are hit to left than to
right.  True, at the higher levels of pro baseball, the right-fielder
will often have the more powerful throwing arm, since it's useful for
preventing runners on first from reaching third on a single, while
there's no analogous relevant situation for the left-fielder, but
'the outfield position in which the player with the weakest throwing
arm is stationed' doesn't really seem relevant for our purposes--in
fact, all things being equal, the expression "should" be "out in/of
right field".  What makes us prefer "out of/in left field" is, I've
always assumed, the general association of leftness with the weird or
unconventional (due to properties of both handedness and politics).

--Larry Horn,
pseudonymous author of two entries in _Studies Out in Left Field:
Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of
his 33rd or 34th Birthday_, A. M. Zwicky et al., eds. (Edmonton:
Linguistic Research Inc., 1971)