Sometimes, even a wrong number can make the right connection.

That was the case for Lauren Stevens, whose newly assigned work phone came with an unexpected problem: it kept receiving calls and texts for someone named “Verndawg.” At first, the messages were confusing. Over time, they became life-changing, for both Stevens and the man behind the nickname, renowned San Francisco photographer Wernher Krutein.

Shortly after getting the phone, Stevens began receiving repeated messages clearly meant for someone else. Curious, she and a group of friends did some online sleuthing to track down the intended recipient.

It didn’t take long.

“One of my friends texted me and said, ‘This guy, Wernher Krutein, he’s iconic,’” Stevens said.

Krutein, 72, has spent more than six decades traveling the world with a camera, documenting everything from people and architecture to insects and everyday objects. While his work spans continents, some of his most famous photographs were taken closer to home in San Francisco.

One image immediately stood out to Stevens: Krutein’s striking photograph from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, showing a car dangling from the collapsed Bay Bridge.

“I grew up seeing that photo in textbooks and documentaries,” she said. “And this was the photo.”

A longtime film photography enthusiast herself, Stevens found Krutein’s old website, Photovault.com, an archive of nearly half a million images, and decided to email him. What began as a practical exchange about forwarding messages soon became something deeper.

“You could tell he didn’t really care about the messages,” Stevens said. “What mattered to him was that someone cared about his work.”

Emails turned into phone calls, then in-person visits to Krutein’s home in Sonoma County. As their friendship grew, Stevens began to understand the challenges the celebrated photographer was quietly facing.

Starting his website in the late 1990s, Krutein was once ahead of the technological curve, but in an increasingly digital world, he found himself struggling financially.

“I’ve been barely making a living for years,” Krutein said. “I’ve pared down everything. I don’t even have heat in the house.”

He told Stevens his savings could last anywhere from six months to two years. After that, he wasn’t sure what would happen.

Wanting to help, Stevens launched a GoFundMe campaign to assist with Krutein’s living expenses. It has since raised more than $15,000. But financial relief was only part of her goal.

Krutein was deeply worried about the future of his archive, his life’s work, and, as he describes it, his purpose.

“I love connecting with everything I photograph,” he said. “Bugs, cars, people, furniture, all of it fascinates me.”

Using her understanding of social media, Stevens created TikTok and Instagram accounts called @Verndawgtales, documenting their friendship and sharing Krutein’s photographs and stories. Thousands of followers now track their journey as Stevens works to preserve Krutein’s legacy and bring renewed attention to his work.

“The world needs to see his work,” Stevens said. “It is crazy, diabolically amazing, and I feel so lucky to be the vessel to share his story.”

For Krutein, the impact has gone beyond recognition or financial support.

“She’s brought me out of the darkness,” he said. “That’s a gift beyond words.”

We have shared with you the ongoing travails of such baseball meh factories as the Mets, Phillies, Angels, Red Sox, and Nationals, but as in the new-style NBA, where if you’re not winning, you can at least convince yourselves that you’re winning backwards, there’s a lot more suck out there than the average pair of lungs can be expected to navigate.

Which brings us to those imps of inertia, those superstars of shutout losses, those exemplars of Hey, We’re Not Even The Rockies, the San Francisco Giants. At the time of this writing—the middle of the night, after the crying has stopped and the desperate regrets of yesterday have faded into the scheduled emotional mudslides of tomorrow—the Giants sit at 13-20, tied for second worst in the National League with Team McKinney, two games ahead of Team Roth, and barely a half-game ahead of Team Kalaf. This tells us that Defector’s staff really know how to pick ’em, mostly.

But there is more to learn in this squalid corner of the standings, none of it good. The Giants are particularly special because they not only lose their game each day, but they reliably do so in a hurry. Their average game comes in at 2:36, which is both shorter than One Battle After Another and the fastest such running time in baseball. The Giants manage these ultra-efficient game times in the most time-honored of ways—by not cluttering up the passage of one inning into the next with extraneous offense. Or, really, any offense. They have scored eight fewer runs (barely three per game) than any team in the sport, have hit only six more homers as a team than Chicago’s Munetaka Murakami has managed on his lonesome, and rank barely ahead of the Mets and Phillies and no one else in most of your more sophisticated offensive metrics. Their two least productive everyday hitters, Willy Adames and Rafael Devers, are also their most expensive. Their manager, Tony Vitello, runs his bullpen like he’s coaching a three-game series against Auburn, which he was just last year in his previous gig managing the University of Tennessee. They have been shut out seven times already, scored one run in four more instances, and two runs in four others. That’s 15 of their 20 losses right there. In short, you know what you’re getting at a Giants game—one trip to the concessions stand, one trip to the bathroom, and a slow walk to the Ferry Building in the top of the seventh.

Not that anyone should have had grandiose expectations about this team. It has essentially been this way, with only one exception, since the halcyon (as opposed to Halcion) days of the mid-teens, when the Giants pitched, fielded, and grit-and-guiled their way to three World Series wins in five years. In the 11 years and change since, they have scored fewer runs than all but a handful of typical moribundities (the White Sox, Royals, Tigers, Pirates, and Marlins), and that isn’t all explained away by the capaciousness and subsequent capriciousness of their ballpark. The Giants simply don’t hit. Or maybe to be kinder, they just can’t.

It is a truism that teams that lose and don’t hit are aesthetically far worse than teams that lose and can’t pitch (the 2025 Rockies) or can’t field (the 2024 White Sox). These Giants, for example, are also dead last in baseball in walks and stolen bases, so their inertial qualities are strewn far and wide across the metric summaries of the age. When they play, essentially nothing happens, and unlike, say, the Mets, the Giants can’t say they have been ravaged by injuries. It is closer to the truth to say that they have been ravaged by health. This, ladles and jellyspoons, is who and what they are.

Their weekend series in Tampa has been properly instructive. Friday, they lost 3-0, with six hits, five of them singles; they got only one runner into scoring position, and the aforementioned score spoils the punchline on how that turned out. On Saturday, the score was 5-1, achieved with the help of seven hits, two of them doubles, one each by Arraez and Devers in succession; Devers’ hit center fielder Chandler Simpson’s glove and lived to tell the tale. They put three runners into scoring position in that one. They’re last in that number, too, in case you foolishly thought that hope should spring eternal even if baserunners do not.

But it’s the home run numbers that make this all feel so gray-numbers-on-gray-jerseys-with-gray-trim. In the Three True Outcomes era, they are currently on pace to finish with 93 homers, the second worst total in this century. And no, this does not look like the 1979 Astros, who won 89 games while hitting just 49 homers. This looks like what it is—a team that does its work a bit too quickly and much too quietly.

And when we said Three True Outcomes, we did not mean to gloss under their league low in walks. At their current rate of barely two per game, they would end up with 329, which would be the lowest total for any team in the 162-game era. Which, to be fair, only covers the last 64 seasons, give or take the odd lockout.

That leaves strikeouts, and there we have the most enduring anomaly, which is that the Giants actually don’t strike out an inordinate amount. They are, if anything, striking out an entirely ordinate amount—right in the middle of the pack in strikeout percentage and just outside the top ten (with the Dodgers) in total strikeouts. In sum, they are short in all three true outcomes, a lack of achievement for the ages. Next to this, the travails of the comrades’ favorite teams listed above don’t add up, or subtract down, in quite the same way.

Some fans have already turned on Vitello; during Saturday’s game, umpire Hunter Wendelstedt and his crew first mocked Vitello—”there was something about rah rah and pom poms,” he said after the game, “which I assume was something to do with either college or my behavior in the dugout”—and then ejected him. A few are even getting skittish about the head of baseball operations, Buster Posey, who is on balance still the baseball icon of his age on the bayfront. But mostly they are doing what Bay Area fans when the going gets tough—they go somewhere else. Booing is an extravagance at these prices, and so they stay at home and wonder why they can’t have fun things like this:

Yeah. Fun things like what the White Sox have. A fresh hell if ever there was one.

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — According to a new audit, the San Francisco Zoo violated city rules by spending $12 million on projects without required approval.

The report looks at the zoo’s finances from 2019 to last year. It claims the zoo was operating under a budget deficit for years while dealing with failures in management and financial planning.

Zoo officials must get permission from the city’s Park and Rec Commission for projects worth more than $50,000.

The report also details claims from zoo employees, saying the zoo has a toxic work environment because of favoritism and discrimination.

KRON4 received the below statement from the zoo’s CEO.

We appreciate the thorough work of the audit team and welcome recommendations that will strengthen the Zoo’s operations and long-term sustainability. Many improvements are already underway, and we are committed to implementing the remaining recommendations. We are grateful to the Mayor, Supervisor Melgar, and Rec and Park for working with us on a responsible loan structure that gives the Zoo the ability to continue this progress and fully deliver on the audit’s recommendations.

San Francisco Zoo CEO Cassandra Costello

The zoo is facing a more than $6 million budget deficit.