"[1] The variation "out in left field" means alternately "removed from the ordinary, unconventional" or "out of contact with reality, out of touch.
[4][5][6] In May 1981, Safire asked readers of The New York Times to send him any ideas they had regarding the origin of the phrase "out of left field"—he did not know where it came from, and did not refer to Shaw's work.
[8][9] The earliest scholarly citation Safire could find was a 1961 article in the journal American Speech, which defined the variation "out in left field" as meaning "disoriented, out of contact with reality.
Marcus Callies, an associate professor of English and philology at the University of Mainz in Germany, wrote that "the precise origin is unclear and disputed", referring to Christine Ammer's conclusion in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms.
[13] According to the 2007 Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the phrase came from baseball terminology, referring to a play in which the ball is thrown from the area covered by the left fielder to either home plate or first base, surprising the runner.