GREAT WEST LEAGUE Gold Sox fall to Potters in return from all-star break

After two days off for the allstar break, the Yuba-sutter Gold Sox returned to the field on Tuesday night looking to put together a final push for the Great West League’s fourth-and-final playoff spot.

The Gold Sox entered the day five games back of a postseason berth with only 13 games left to play, and appeared to have an important win in the books when they took a 5-2 lead over the Lincoln Potters heading into the bottom of the seventh inning.

A victory wasn’t to be, however, as the Potters scored the last four runs, including the game-winner in the bottom of the ninth to hand the Gold Sox a tough 6-5

SANTA CLARA – Kyle Shanahan is on stage, calmly sitting before an audience of diehard, rowdy fans. Their incumbent coach – the 49ers’ first since Jim Harbaugh – is asked about this season’s goal.

One fan after another shouts: “Super Bowl!”

“Without me saying it, and everyone else said it, you know what our goal is every year,” Shanahan responds.

That was two months ago, when the 49ers held a raucous State-ofthe-franchise event at downtown San Jose’s California Theater. A 6-10 season wasn’t cause for glee as much as the 5-0 finish.

Enough optimism abounds that, from last summer to this summer, they’ve gone from 200to-1 Super Bowl long shots to 20to-1 candidates.

“We turned a lot (of the roster) over last year, grinded hard, had a lot of ups and downs, but we finished as a better team,” Shanahan said on a stage he harmoniously shared with general manager John Lynch. “We’ve added players in the draft and free agency. We’ve put ourselves in a situation to be a lot better.”

As the 49ers officially report to training camp today, just know these aren’t your woebegone, give-’em-a-shot 49ers. Basically, half the starting lineup is different from last summer’s camp, and so are the expectations.

A slew of players arrived early this past week to get a jump on workouts, including quarterback Oakland Raiders left tackle Donald Penn will open training camp on the active/physically unable to perform list as he continues to recover from Lisfranc surgery in December. Quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo led San Francisco to a 5-0 finish in 2017, helping the 49ers go from 200-to-1 Super Bowl long shots last year to 20-to-1 candidates entering this season.

Jimmy Garoppolo and linebacker Reuben Foster, the offseason’s biggest newsmakers (for contrasting reasons).

Garoppolo, who signed a thenrecord contract for $137.5 million in February, knows he and the revised offense need these coming

weeks to enhance chemistry and nail-down details.

“You learn how to trust one another in practice,” Garoppolo said at last month’s minicamp.

So who can you trust? Who, indeed.