<P> "Out of left field" is American slang meaning "unexpectedly", "odd" or "strange". The phrase came from baseball terminology referring to the area covered by the left fielder who has the farthest throw to first base . According to mlb.com there is another meaning: "The term' way out in left field' is taken to mean' crazy ."' Cook County Hospital (by the West Side Grounds, the Chicago Cubs first location under what is now the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine) had a mental institution behind left field, (This cannot be true . Left field was against Wood St .) (...) The bottom line is, patients could be heard yelling and screaming things at fans behind the left field wall ."' Variations include "out in left field" and simply "left field". </P> <P> Popular music historian Arnold Shaw wrote in 1949 for the Music Library Association that the term "out of left field" was first used in the idiomatic sense of "from out of nowhere" by the music industry to refer to a song that unexpectedly performed well in the market . Based on baseball lingo, a sentence such as "That was a hit out of left field" was used by song pluggers who promoted recordings and sheet music, to describe a song requiring no effort to sell . A "rocking chair hit" was the kind of song which came "out of left field" and sold itself, allowing the song plugger to relax . A 1943 article in Billboard magazine expands the use to describe people unexpectedly drawn to radio broadcasting: </P>

Where did the phrase out of left field come from