Southpaws

Baseball Digest, August, 2000 by Gerry Fraley

The extra movement often leads to control problems for left-handers. Tommy Byrne, a left-hander, is the career leader for walks-per-nine-innings at 6.9.

More than usual

Left-handers make up about nine percent of the general population. They appear at more than double that rate on major league staffs.

Excluding position players given mop-up duty, a total of 571 pitchers appeared in the majors last season. There were 162 left-handers in that group, giving them 28.4 percent of the staffs' spots.

A colorful lot

In baseball jargon, "left-hander" means to be goofy, spacey, odd.

The designation probably began with left-hander Rube Waddell. He had four consecutive 20-win seasons (19021905) with the Philadelphia Athletics and a then-record 349 strikeouts in 1904. He led the A.L. in strikeouts from 1902-1907 with the A's and the N.L. in 1900 with the Pirates.

But Waddell's erratic behavior overshadowed his pitching. He liked to chase fire engines, lead parades and play marbles under the stands between innings of games. He was a man-child who probably was mentally deficient, but in baseball he became a "flake."

Other left-handed pitchers perpetuated the image: Nick Altrock, who became a baseball clown; Hall of Famer Lefty Gomez; Bill "Spaceman" Lee; and McGraw.

There have also been rational left-handers and erratic right-handers such as Dizzy Dean and Bobo Newsom, but the lasting image of left-handers is one of "flakes."

There is something different about left-handers, traits that affect their character and their pitching.

Dr. Martin Samuels, chief of neurology at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, said a left-hander's brain "is wired differently." Left-handers' brains are more symmetrical, which leads to more communication between the two sides. That makes the left-hander more flexible and more able to deal with visual and spatial problems.

For baseball, that means a lefthander should be better than a right-hander for determining where a pitch should go and how the body should function in the delivery.

Because there are no brain surgeons in dugouts, baseball people accept what they see. There is something special about left-handed pitchers.

Baseball's BEST Left-Handed Pitchers

HITTERS GENERALLY PREFER FACING A PITCHER who throws from the opposite side. That's because hitting is a matter of hand-eye coordination and timing, and the faster and easier a hitter sees the ball coming out of a pitcher's hand and identifies its telltale spin to anticipate its movement, the better his chance of finding it with his swinging bat.

Even the best hitters fail at this about seven out of 10 times. But most fail less often when facing a pitcher throwing from the opposite side. That's why left-handed hitters usually prefer facing right-handed pitchers, right-handed hitters prefer facing left-handed pitchers, and managers constantly change personnel to create the most favorable matchups.

That's baseball by the book. But not everyone buys the book.

"I think one of the biggest misconceptions in baseball is that a right-hander has to face a right-hander and a left-hander has to face a left-hander," Baltimore Orioles first baseman Will Clark said. "If you're a successful pitcher, you have to face both. And if you're a successful hitter, you have to face both."