The Inner Sunset spent thirty-one years with a large sports bar on Irving Street and then lost it. Blackthorn, at 834 Irving, was evicted after a court ruling and closed permanently, which removed the neighbourhood's obvious answer to the question of where to watch anything. Neighbourhoods absorb that kind of loss in one of two ways: either everybody starts driving somewhere else, or the remaining rooms quietly expand into the gap. Irving Street has done the second, and the main beneficiary is a smaller, older bar two blocks west.
Baseball leaves long gaps and the best postseason bars give you something to do inside them. Tell Karpo which nights you are free during the series and get San Francisco rooms with darts, pool or a patio rather than just a screen and a stool.
What a saloon is, as opposed to a sports bar
Yancy's Saloon at 734 Irving is not trying to be a stadium annexe. It has plenty of televisions and it gets genuinely crowded for anything significant, but its identity rests on two other things: several properly lit dart lanes, and a reputation for pouring strong. Those are saloon qualities rather than sports-bar qualities, and for postseason baseball the combination turns out to be close to ideal.
Here is why. A playoff baseball game contains perhaps fifteen minutes of things worth watching closely, distributed across three and a half hours. A sports bar handles that by giving you more screens, which does not help, because the problem is not a shortage of baseball. What helps is having something to do with your hands during a pitching change and a reason to stand up between innings. Dart lanes solve that completely, and they do it without pulling your attention out of the room the way a phone does. The same logic is why pool tables survive in baseball bars and why the rooms with neither tend to empty out by the sixth inning of a one-sided game — people do not leave because they have stopped caring, they leave because there is nothing to do with the parts of the evening the game is not using.
The hours are the thing to check
This is a neighbourhood bar rather than an all-day operation, and it opens in the late afternoon rather than at lunchtime — five in the evening on a weekday, for instance. Postseason baseball on Pacific time frequently starts at five or six, which means the door opens roughly when the first pitch is thrown, and the comfortable arrival is not two hours early but ten minutes after opening. Weekend afternoon games are a different question entirely and worth confirming before you walk over, because an afternoon first pitch can land before the bar is open at all.
It is a small enough room that this matters. Big games fill it — Warriors playoff nights are the local benchmark for how tight it can get — and there is no overflow space to spill into. Turning up at opening on an elimination night is the difference between a seat and a corner.
Irving Street solves the food problem
A 5pm first pitch is the most awkward start time in sport. It is too early to have eaten and too late to eat afterwards without it becoming a second evening. The Inner Sunset happens to be one of the best-equipped neighbourhoods in San Francisco for exactly this, because Irving Street between Fifth and Tenth is a dense, unfussy run of restaurants where you can be fed properly in twenty-five minutes without a reservation and without spending much. Eat first, walk over, and you have removed the only genuine logistical problem an October evening presents.
The neighbourhood's other advantage is the N Judah, which runs along Irving and connects the whole avenue to downtown without a car. For a night that is going to involve strong pours and possibly extra innings, that is a more relevant fact than anything about the bar itself.
- Opens late afternoon — check the hours against an afternoon first pitch before walking over
- Several lit dart lanes, which is the reason to choose it over a bigger screen count
- Small room, fills fast for elimination games, no overflow space
- Eat on Irving Street first; the N Judah gets you home afterwards
The fog is part of the equation
October in the Sunset is not October anywhere else in the city. This is the foggiest, coldest quarter of San Francisco for most of the year, and the run of clear warm weeks that the rest of the city calls autumn arrives here inconsistently. Practically, that means a dark warm bar has more appeal on this side of town than it does in the Mission, and it also means the walk from the N Judah to the door can be genuinely cold at ten at night in a way that catches visitors out. Bring a layer you would not need downtown. It also changes what the room is for. In a warm neighbourhood a bar competes with the street outside it; in the Sunset in October the street is actively unpleasant for eight months of the year, which is why the bars out here tend to be built for staying rather than for passing through, and why the regulars are regulars.
Practical notes
Yancy's Saloon, 734 Irving Street, Inner Sunset, San Francisco. A neighbourhood sports saloon with multiple televisions, several well-lit dart lanes and a reputation for strong pours. Opens in the late afternoon rather than at midday, so confirm hours against an afternoon first pitch. Small room that fills quickly for major games. Blackthorn at 834 Irving, the neighbourhood's long-running larger sports bar, closed permanently following an eviction ruling after thirty-one years, so do not plan around it. Irving Street between Fifth and Tenth covers food before the game, and the N Judah runs the length of the street for getting home afterwards.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #InnerSunset #IrvingStreet #MLBPlayoffs #Darts #SFGiants #SportsBar #NeighborhoodBar #WatchParty #BayArea #OctoberBaseball #SFBars #ThingsToDoSF #FoggySF
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which bars near you are carrying a specific postseason game, which ones are quiet enough on a weeknight, and what is open on Irving Street afterwards? Ask Karpo for the room that matches the series you are following and a plan for dinner around a 5pm first pitch.
