On a recent Thursday night in an alley behind South Park, a dozen or so people smoked and sipped Modelos outside The Natural, a batting cage and bullpen a few blocks from Oracle Park. You could easily miss this spot were it not for the Mel Waters-painted mural of the Giants’ Tim Linceum on the frontside of the building at 358 Brannan St.
On that night, the pitching machine wasn't the main draw. Little Dog, an indie rock trio from Portland, was playing on a makeshift stage right in front of the batter's box, their amps flanking the edges of the 12-foot wide cage nestled within the slightly larger space. The crowd was packed tightly, as if they had front row seats behind home plate at the ballpark, but instead of arguing balls and strikes, they bounced and headbobbed away to Dinosaur Jr.-ish riffs.
The art was on theme: a towering knockoff one of Patrick Nagel’s ultra-stylized ‘80s portraits with the nearly featureless model wearing a ballcap and holding a mitt across her bust. A small gallery of baseball ephemera runs alongside the cage in a smaller opening: vintage bats, figurines of Barry Zito, Crazy Crab, and a Bull Durham VHS tape. An old RCA boombox blasts KEXP's daily programming in the afternoons.
There’s a curiously thorough library of baseball books and zines from Kinsella classics to a Japanese version of Ball Four. Hanging out at The Natural — named for Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel about a once-in-a-lifetime ballplayer named Roy Hobbs, made even more famous by Robert Redford's portrayal of the slugger 30 years later — feels more like stepping back into the garage rock-era Mission District than it does like San Francisco in 2026. Aren't places like this not supposed to exist anymore in SF?
"People need places to gather," said Hannon Smith, the Bay Area-lifer and Pacific Coast Hardball League (PCHL) player who first opened The Natural in July 2025. Smith's DIY scene past saw him booking shows and running local spaces like the Ball Four Banquet Hall, a baseball-themed speakeasy in Oakland, before he crossed back over the bridge where he opened The Natural and lives in an apartment above it.
Citing the loss of Edinburgh Castle and the impending departures of Thee Parkside and Bottom of the Hill, Smith laments: "If everyone gets booted, the city would get really boring again."
In late 2024, Smith stumbled across a Craigslist post for the Brannan Street building. It was zoned for entertainment, but included a strange stipulation that whoever ran the business downstairs also had to live in the apartment above. It had been vacant for three years and Smith, who also works in Major League Baseball's quality control data analytics department, decided to take a big swing.
The 80-foot-long batting cage itself is masterfully crafted for baseball: It has a regulation pitcher's mound that's the MLB-requisite 60-feet-and-6-inches from the plate and a HACK Attack pitching machine capable of throwing as much as 100 mph heat. And has live music in its veins: When he was building out the cage, Smith found Polaroids inside of the walls of ‘90s goth raves that went down in the former auto garage and tech office that once occupied the space. A major inspiration was a similar space in Philadelphia called Everybody Hits, a batting cage that had punk shows that closed in 2019.
While Smith operates The Natural’s day-to-day and books some of the shows; local promoters like Z + N Presents, run by Nick Oka of local jangle pop band The Umbrellas, and DJ Zack Zoom help fill out the calendar of once-a-week indie, punk, and hardcore shows. They're all donation-based and have a BYOB policy. Weston Tate, a librarian at CCSF, maintains an online catalog for what he and Smith jokingly refers to as "the second baseball library in the entire world,” a nod to the Baseball Hall of Fame's heralded collection in Cooperstown, NY. With few residential buildings within an earshot, Smith says noise complaints have never been an issue.
The Natural has hosted birthday parties and Giants pre-game hangs. There's suggested pricing on the website: $120 per hour or $60 for half, plus a "Say Hey Bucket" named after Willie Mays that offers 24 balls for $24, but Smith says he's not really counting. The "Hang In There Giants" option lets people name their price and Smith adds that nobody is turned away for lack of funds.
“I want it to be free someday,” says Smith. “The hope is to get more memberships and monthly donations to make that truly happen.”
For the most part these days, it's baseball players of all levels who are booking out the facility. Along with PCHL players working on their swings or fastballs, high school teams from Galileo and Washington High School have also used the space for practice. Last summer, my beer league softball team booked an hour-long session. We got to dial in the softball machine just how we wanted it, and watched a ballgame on the lone screen in the room while we downed a couple cold ones and took turns heckling the whiffs and praising the wallops.
There's even been a high-profile visitor who used the facility. During the Giants season opening series against the New York Yankees this past March, Yankees backup catcher J.C. Escarra booked a session on an off day. Smith became friends with private hitting instructor Andrew Martinez, who brought Escarra in.
"It was so crazy to hear a major leaguer hit in there," Smith said. "It’s a different sweet crack of the bat."
Soon after we learned that we had officially swung a bat in the same cage as a big leaguer, a few of my teammates and I came through for that Little Dog show.
In between sets, we stepped outside to get some air, smoked cigarettes, sipped drinks and peeped some of Smith's photography he had hung up outside for the night. Then something weird happened: A Waymo tried to come up the alleyway and remained stopped for minutes, as if it couldn't register what it was witnessing. The couple dozen of us outside weren't sure what to do about the motionless driverless car, until Smith stepped outside to assess the situation.
“Hey guys, let’s move towards the wall so we can let it pass by,” he said.
Soon the driverless car started to amble in between us. I was feeling loose and had some fun with it. “Come on boy, right this way!” I said to the car, as if it were a dog and I was gesturing down the alley.
It squeezed through us and into the night it went. The rest of us stubbed out our cigarettes or cracked another beer and headed back into the concert inside of a batting cage that felt like a portal back to another time and place altogether.
