The State of the Southpaw
Baseball is simple: it has pitchers and hitters. Pitchers can either be left-handed or a right-handed. Or, you can be Pat Venditte and throw with both. Lefties have always garnered special consideration in the baseball world (southpaw vs northpaw), which has transferred into a seemingly unwarranted obsession with their presence and performance. In any case, pitchers (both left-handed or right) have a sole purpose — to get hitters out. The balance between righties and lefties in a team’s rotation or bullpen has always been predicated on the ability to get outs, rather than the perceived balance itself.
The value of a southpaw’s assets is constantly in flux, and MLB managers can’t seem to come to a consensus to this day. The high valuation of left-handed pitchers is often linked to their perceived scarcity. Making up around 10% of the population, lefties are an obvious rare commodity. This figure jumps to just under 30% when looking at left-handers in Major League Baseball. Due to the 20% uptick between the general population and the baseball population, many budding economists and baseball fans alike assume that the low supply of southpaws naturally creates a high demand. This in fact, is not quite true. The “quota” of left-handed pitchers in baseball is not a requirement, but simply the result of teams looking for pitchers who can get outs. The number of lefties vs. righties on any given team is no longer affected by a pre-determined ideal ratio. Rather, modern analytics and smart management have determined that the south/northpaw split is determined by which pitchers, handiness out of the equation, are the most effective options.
Still, many argue that lefties do have a quantifiable value due to left-handed batters’ extremely weak same-side platoon splits (they struggle to hit LHPs) — greater than any other split in baseball. These statistics, shown in the chart below, evidence the value of having left-handed pitchers on your roster. But it is important to note that only around 40% of all plate appearances involve left-handed batters, leaving a greater requirement for effective right-handed pitching. But the “requirement” of either isn’t what teams should be looking at. Since the platoon splits are simply averages, what teams should begin to look at are a pitchers’ ability to create outs. Recently, Cincinnati Red’s star first basemen Joey Votto commented on these misconceptions — urging teams to simply discover effective pitchers.
Left-handed pitchers are employed in the MLB to, at the very least, pitch to left-handed hitters. Many below-average Major League pitchers have created a role for themselves predicated solely on their production against left-handed batters. For example, Nationals pitcher Sammy Solis spent much of the 2015–16 offseason working on pitches that would assist in his ability to retire lefties — stating he knew he would always have a job if he could “learn how to get lefties out.” But if Solis can learn how to pitch to lefties, what is stopping right-handers from perfecting their arsenal to do the same? The stigma that same-side pitchers (known as LOOGYs) are the only way to attack an opposing teams batter actually “pigeonholes” pitchers, thus contributing to the endless cycle of poor same-side splits.
With the value of relievers skyrocketing and elite stoppers signing mega-deals, teams are quickly recognizing the need for quality options out of the pen. It is important that teams don’t shackle themselves with the same old-school mentality plaguing certain franchises and cling to the desire for left-handed balance. It will be interesting to see with the modern game and pen usage rapidly changing how much the southpaw’s role fluctuates. As always, performance is paramount to the value of any pitcher. As much as players would like to assume that they control their fate; the ball is, very literally, out of their hands.
