Why Are Lefties Crafty?
Last week, baseball lost former Cy Young winner Mike Flanagan. This post is not a eulogy for Flanagan. I’ll leave that to writers more skilled than myself. One of those, Joe Posnanski, wrote a tribute to Flanagan in a column entitled “The Crafty Lefty Hall of Fame.”
I’ve always been fascinated by crafty lefties, and Posnanski’s story made me wonder: why don’t we ever hear about crafty righties? Perhaps “crafty” is an adjective that — due to some old baseball tradition — is used exclusively for southpaws. The other possibility is that there just aren’t as many crafty righties. It turns out, this is one historical baseball saying that holds up under statistical analysis.
A crafty pitcher is a guy who gets by on smoke and mirrors, not raw power. I’m sure Posnanski would agree with this, in principle, but there’s one major difference between his definition of “crafty” and mine. Posnanski defines it as someone who dodges trouble despite giving up eight or more hits and getting three or fewer strikeouts in a game. To me, a crafty pitcher is someone who makes hitters look foolish despite his lack of “stuff.” He’s plenty effective, yet completely un-intimidating. In the spectrum of crafty lefties, Randy Johnson is on one end and Jaime Moyer is on the other.
Posnanski and I can differ on the semantics of craftiness. That’s not the point here. I’m here out to find out if lefties are indeed craftier than righties — or if it’s just an outdated axiom.
The data for this analysis is starting pitchers between 2002 and 2011. Apologies to Mr. Flanagan, but our pitch-velocity data only goes back that far. The sample gives us 108 pitchers and one outlier who was removed. While Tim Wakefield is certainly crafty in his own way, the knuckleballer throws a wrench into this analysis.
A scatter plot of each pitcher’s strikeout percentage and average fastball velocity shows a clear relationship between how hard a pitcher throws and how many batters he strikes out:
The definition I’m using for “crafty” are the pitchers who strike out the most batters with the least velocity. On this chart, the pitchers who are the farthest north from the trend line are the craftiest because they strike out more batters than their velocities would indicate.
Using this definition, the craftiest pitcher in baseball during this period was Tim Lincecum. Sure, he throws hard (93 FBv), but his 27% K rate is the highest in the sample — higher than Felix Hernandez, Ubaldo Jimenez, Justin Verlander and other flamethrowers. Lincecum is not the first name that comes to mind when thinking about craftiness, but The Freak is pretty crafty. (The least crafty? Carlos Silva, with his 91 FBv and 10.5% K rate.)
Lincecum is not the only crafty righty, but six of the top 10 “craftiest” pitchers are lefties. In fact, extend the list and 13 of the top 25 pitchers are southpaws — despite that only 30% of the sample is left-handed. The fact that 60% of the top 10 and 52% of the top 25 are lefties shows that, indeed, left-handed pitchers are craftier than right handed pitchers. But that begs the question: why?
The first point of interest here is that lefties, on average, throw 1.7 mph slower than right-handers. There are a number of other biological and strategic theories why this happens, and they’re probably true, at least on some level. The simple statistical answer has to do with the fact that there are simply more right-handed people in the world than left-handed people.
According to Scientific American, only 15% of the world’s population is left-handed. In theory, for every left-handed human who has the ability to throw 95 mph (one in a million, maybe?), there are eight or nine right-handed humans who can throw that hard. However, due to the strategy of baseball, there is a higher percentage of lefties in the MLB than in the general population. Teams have to reach deeper into the left-handed talent pool than they do into the right-handed one, which means there are more soft-tossing lefties.
Whatever the reason for the velocity difference, the lefties in this sample are able to get more swinging strikes and have a higher strikeout percentage than their right-handed counterparts — despite throwing almost 2 mph slower. Some of this might be explained by the platoon breakdown by hand.
While right-handed pitchers have a slight advantage when facing the same hand, the disparity between the splits for left-handed pitchers is about five-times larger. The reason behind this might be physiological — similar to the phenomenon that most left-handed hitters like the ball low and inside — or perhaps is developmental in the way lefties are coached. Any guess I have would be pure speculation. Also recall that these numbers are for starters only, so it has nothing to do with lefty specialist relievers.
The final piece of the data does little to answer our question. Right handed pitchers in the sample faced a nearly perfect 50-50 split of right-handed and left-handed hitters. The lefty pitchers faced 23% lefties and 77% righties. So, despite inferior velocity and lineups designed to minimize a platoon advantage, left-handed pitchers still posted better strikeout numbers than the right-handers did.
Crafty lefties are just one of myriad nuances that make baseball great, and the mystery as to why they exist adds to the game’s charm. Now that’s crafty.
Jamie Moyer
I was going to originally going to say something, but after reading all the responses with everybody having their own definition of “crafty”, I suddenly don’t care anymore.
This is a great article… I still use the phrase crafty lefty… Baseball is wonderful, and I thank the people who study the game to this day to keep these phrases alive.
Do you know the reason a lazy fly ball is refered to as “a can of corn”?
I have an idea why but would like it confirmed.
Livan Hernandez = crafty
Agree. Livan is the definition of crafty….and he is a righty.
No, as a RHP, he’s a junkballer….
Summary of innacurate baseball descriptors:
Crafty – LHPs who get by on smarts and guile
Junkballer – RHPs who get by on smarts and guile
Athletic, Strong – black or Latino player who could be so much better if only they buckled down and learned fundamentals.
Toolsy – fast black outfielders who can steal bases but only hit doubles past double A.
Speedy- skinny black or small Latino players who pop up and fly out 20 times for every wall scraping homer they hit. Good 1st to 3rd
Slugging- fat white or black corner infielders who strike out a ton
Scrappy- skinny, often short players who choke up on the bat and often endure head rubbings from taller player. Slugging percentage at least 150 points below average.
Pesky- latino version of scrappy
Flashy- jewelry wearing version of athletic. Must be suspended once a year and miss team buses or meetings. Often requests trade or pouts and alienates team until traded. Maybe black or Latino.
Goofy – lanky, scrappy or pesky player with undisclosed social anxiety issues exacerbated by fan or media taunting and marijuana or serious drinking issue.
Gritty – white or Latino or over the hill black players who play through injury and get the rare winning RBI
Get your terms right!
I don’t like Wolfersberger’s definition of “crafty,” which somehow includes Tim Lincecum but excludes guys like Livan Hernandez and Mark Buehrle and Paul Byrd and Jon Garland, because they don’t strike anyone out.
One issue is that you can be “crafty” without striking guys out. Another issue is that you can have good “stuff” (i.e., the opposite of “crafty”) without having great velocity.
Related: is there a difference between a crafty pitcher and a junkballer?
Junkballers, to me, are guys who rarely (relatively speaking) throw their 4 seamer (or sinker if they are a sinker guy). Basically, they thrown changes, curves, sliders, and splits all day and keep you guessing. However, many guys throw cutters instead now and that fudges the numbers a bit. Livan is still one of the best at this – 48% FB% this year. Chris Narveson, James Shields, and Shaun Marcum are in this group this year too.
Yeah, I do think that crafty pitchers often pitch to a lot of contact. Livan hits the bill. Tim Hudson is crafty – he’ll get you with those groundouts.
I agree with Poz’s definition more than your own here. I think crafty pitchers are those who minimize damage by frustrating batters, not necessarily with K’s, but even grounders or IFFBs. Crafty guys don’t have good “stuff”, but can get outs by staying a step ahead of hitters. Randy Johnson doesn’t strike me as crafty, nor does Lincecum. I’d call Silva crafty, Livan Hernandez, Moyer is the poster child, Glavine. I would think your correlation analysis should use something like ERA or FIP correlated to velocity, not K’s, which is only one way a pitcher can get guys out. The craftiest guys aren’t generally K guys IMO.
That’s how I’d interpret “crafty,” as well. I’d throw Mark Buehrle in there; he’s thrown two no-hitters but doesn’t have what anyone could call “great stuff.”
Excellent choice.
Nonetheless this is interesting stuff on lefty strikeout rates and velocity, even if we term the skill “swing-and-missiness” rather than “craftiness”. It’s a great quantification of something extremely mysterious.
Agreed, the depth of analysis and detail is excellent, just a difference of opinion on the original definition. There likely will be various definitions, though not as many as we get with MVP or “stuff” discussions.
I would say that Lincecum is crafty because he has one of the most unpredictable pitch selection sequences in baseball. He’s willing to throw any pitch in any count, and place it in or out of the zone at will. Lincecum might have velocity, but the pitch selection leaves hitters stumped because they never have any idea what he’s about to throw.
Plus he randomly lets loose pitches you’ve never seen him throw on a regular basis.
Lincecum is pretty crafty in the way he mixes up his pitches and keeps hitters off balance. Each year he has changed up the mix of his pitches to keep on top, and has only thrown the FB 55% this season
As of last year, we were calling him a junkballer:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/evolution-of-lincecum/
And now? Flamethrower. People have short memories, but a pitcher that isn’t ever the same twice, but still strikes out 11/9IP is as crafty as they get
Bruce Chen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111
Lincecum has to be amongst the least crafty pitchers in baseball.
Freddy Garcia! Now he is crafty! …and right handed.
A good measure of “crafty” would be effectiveness per fastball velocity. A pitcher that is more effective than their fastball velocity suggests they should be is crafty.
…incidentally, it would be interesting to give the AJ Burnett anti-crafty award. The pitcher who is least effective for their fast ball velocity.
addendum: to be “crafty” you should also be in the left most quartile (or any other arbitrary cutoff) of fastball velocity (no “crafty” flame throwers!).
Strongly considered this. The problem is, if you make the cutoff somewhere in the 90 FBv range, it just destroys the sample size.
Jesse,
Make your sample by season rather than by pitcher. What are the craftiest pitching seasons? Are some pitchers consistently crafty? I think that would be interesting and it would greatly increase your sampling of slow pitchers.
Nice work. In the absence of your research I would have assumed the following explanations, in decreasing likelihood:
1. Total myth or too small to measure
2. Entirely explained by platoon splits
3. Lefties rule
Having eliminated 1 and 2, we are forced to go with 3 – lefties simply rule.
I’ve always assumed that left-handed hitters struggle more against LH pitchers than RH hitters do against RH pitchers because growing up they are likely to face almost no high-quality LH pitchers. It’s likely that a talented LH hitter might not face a quality LH pitcher until he reaches the minors by which time many of his hitting attributes are somewhat set. OTOH due to the larger pool of players, a RH hitter is likely to have faced some decent RH pitching at some point in his upbringing.
It also occurred to me that the numbers that force teams to dig deeper into the LH talent pool to find crafty lefties also means that there is probably a large, untapped talent pool of crafty righties out there as well. I mean, there should be 7-8x as many crafty righties as crafty lefties, correct?
Yeah pretty much exactly this. From basically age 9-18, kids face right-handed pitchers 90% of the time, maybe more. It’s not until the minors, which only the best players make, that guys face lefties at a higher rate. So RH hitters get much more comfortable seeing RH pitchers than LH hitters seeing LH pitchers. It’s partially just it’s harder to hit a pitch that looks like it’s coming “at” you, due to arm angle, but RH hitters are so used to it since about age 9 or 10 that it doesn’t bother them as much.
Re: the talent pool of crafty righties… that would only be true if there is true physiological symmetry in underlying physical talents between lefties and righties. That might seem to be a reasonable assumption, but if you eliminate the possibility of physiological asymmetries (such as the famous left-brain/right-brain distinction) then how do you explain the larger number of righties in the world? Is it simply cultural?
This. Absolutely agree. It seems like an over simplification, but batters just see way more RHP than LHP most of their life. There is a comfort level.
Brilliant point. Hitters grow up almost never seeing any quality lefthanded pitching. There are many guys who have good careers in high school baseball who probably see less than 5% of their plate appearances against lefties. It is why many lefthanded hitters in the minors need a longer development period to equalize their platoon splits. Some hitters just never learn. At all levels, lefties can get away with much weaker breaking stuff than righthanders.
The first crafty righthander that came to mind is Paul Byrd. Little velocity to speak of and uses a strange delivery.
I would consider that a fact not an assumption.
I’m guessing that the higher strikeout rate for lefties has something to do with the changeup. Since it’s so good against opposite-handed batters, I assume lefties throw the pitch more often then righties. Being a good swing and miss pitch, it would probably contribute to the higer strikeout rate. I don’t have numbers to back this up, though.
I always considered my mother to be quite crafty, but that has more to do with her use of hot-glue guns than her ability to throw a fastball. She’s right-handed by the way.
I’m glad someone else went this direction with it. Saves me the effort of doctoring pine cones and glitter into a John Lannan photo.
Javier Vasquez recently recorded his 2,500th K, and he did so without really ever having a plus fastball. I wonder who is the pitcher that threw the softest and struck out the most (knuckleballers excluded).
Seen Vazquez hit 96 on the gun a couple of times. Not sure what you consider “plus,” but that is certainly plus velocity (which until recently had gone missing for a season and a half).
Vasquez definitely had a plus fastball earlier in his career. He was a starter that regularly could touch 95 on the gun.
Catfish Hunter, there was a craft righty. One who didn’t need a day in the minors either, despite never having overpowering stuff. I would caution about saying that power pitchers *can’t* be crafty, as a number of them “become” crafty righties as injuries/age take away their stuff.
One of the gutsiest/craftiest games that always comes to mind for me though was the 2003 ALCS Game 7 performance from Pedro Martinez. Everyone remembers that game for Pedro being left in too long (which he definitely was) but they cease to remember that he tossed 7 amazing innings before that without anything approaching his best stuff. He was junkballing it all night & for him, especially at that time, it seemed like he was totally pitching backwards. I want to say his fastball was only hitting like 88 on the gun that night due to fatigue/injury, but he was using every trick in his arsenal & only gave up 2 runs through 7.
That was the amazing thing about Pedro Martinez. He had top flight stuff paired with the best pitching sense on the planet. When he had his best stuff he was unhittable. When he didn’t have his best stuff, he was still largely unhittable. Even as a diehard Yankees fan I loved watching him pitch.
El Duque and David Cone also had fantastic pitching sense and were fun to watch work.
And that wasn’t even Pedro’s greatest “no stuff” performance! That would be game 5 of the 1999 ALDS vs. Cleveland, when he threw 6 innings of no-hit ball in relief relying almost entirely on his curveball.
http://www.nesn.com/2011/08/relive-the-moment-pedro-martinez-dominates-in-relief-in-game-5-of-99-alds.html
That was a great one! Probably one of the most clutch pitching performances I’ve ever seen. ….also gave the Yankees the chance to beat Boston en route to another WS. Of course, the only game Boston won was when Pedro pitched.
I think he was even craftier in 2009 pitching for Philly. He really had nothing left in terms of stuff and the hitters knew it. In 1999 the hitters went to the plate expecting to face the real Pedro. But in 2009 the hitters knew he couldn’t blow them away and he still got outs. Clever bastard.
I think the biggest thing is the 50-50 matchup for righties and the 23-77 for lefties. Lefties need pitches that do well against opposite handed batters more than righties. The changeup and the curveball are two pitches not hurt as much by the platoon . So we see lefties throw more curveballs and changeups, which are slower. This makes them look crafty.
I always think of a pitcher as crafty if, despite having low fast ball speed (say < 93 MPH), and no huge breaking ball, he can get players out. The outs can be BIP or Ks, either way, they are crafty.
Agreed. And this is where the velocity difference comes into play. LHP have a lower velocity on average because of the distribution of general population handedness compared to the demand of MLB rosters. Since LHP get batters out with less “stuff”, they are more “crafty”
Putting aside the quibbles about the semantics of “crafty,” your basic explanation that lefties are rarer (and therefore more prized and coddled by MLB teams) is very probably the explanation for their preponderance in this category. Righthanders who are not power pitchers are much more likely to be dropped before they get a chance to show their value due to “craftiness.”
Bruce Chen should win the Jamie Moyer Crafty Comebackster of the Year Award.
I don’t think the FG community knows who Bruce Chen is, other than he being just another ex-Brave that the Royals acquired.
If we wanted to numerically define “crafty” we could start by looking at FIP-ERA and giving “crafty credit” the the pitchers with the largest positive number.
A crafty pitcher has you salivating in the on-deck circle . . . and then leaves you scratching your head when all you can muster is a pair of routine ground-outs and a weak fly ball to center field. You can wait for something over the heart of the plate, but every strike clips one of your two least favorite corners and every ball is a set-up pitch. He won’t admit it, but he probably throws five different fastballs from three different arm angles, including a choked-back 2-seamer that doubles as one of his six change ups.
Where is Theodore Roosevelt Lilly on your list?
Greg Maddux: craftiest righty ever.
You can’t be that crafty when two or three of your pitches would be rated the best in the league. Maddux in his prime had the best changeup in the game and nearly the best cutter. He definitely got craftier when he lost all his velocity, late in his career.
Maddux was a witch. He he never had overpowering velocity – just great movement and ridiculous command of his entire repertoire, which was deep and in a perpetual state of evolution.
He was by far my favorite pitcher to watch back in the late-80s/early-90s TBS/WGN days. There were some great command pitchers during that era, particularly in the NL, but Maddux and Glavine might deserve the the most credit for turning the strike zone on its side there for almost a decade. They could work over an umpire as well as they could a hitter, dropping pitch after pitch off the outside corner until the umpire would relent and finally give in. Then they would go to work on the newly established corner, get another inch, and so on until they had – and I am not making this up – 6 or 7 inches in both directions off the bottom corners of the plate. And if Maddux caught the batter diving for that outside corner *pop* he would plant a cutter square in his ribs.
Crafty, traditionally, has meant “fools em with slow stuff”. In other words, a left-handed changeup artist, often with a big, slow curveball.
Nowadays, with how RHBs hit lefties, a LH SP needs to be pretty damn good to make the rotation.
Jamie Moyer is a dying breed. He may, actually, be the last of his species.
Livan is a crafty lefty, he’s just a bit confused.
There have been crafty righties as well, often due to being a sidearmer … Quisenberry, Tekulve, Bradford, etc.
Theren’t aren’t a lot of “crafty righties” becuase generally changeups are only really effective against opposite handed batters, and there have traditionally been many more RHBs than LHBs, although the ratio is decreasing in the current age.
I’m trademarking this.
Theren’t = there aren’t.
Awesome.
Speaking of the circle change, Frank Viola (who basically threw a 91 MPH fast ball and an excellent circle change) was a crafty pitcher. Constantly left batters baffled by why they didn’t hit off him despite his “lack of stuff.”
Agreed with Maddux.
It’s worth noting that Maddux credits Jaime Moyer for teaching him that awesome circle change, while they were together in the Cubs system.
So yeah, Maddux was indeed crafty, so crafty (read smart there), that he learned how to be crafty, (in part) from a crafty lefty!
Where most people just love to watch a pitcher throw flames, myself, I can watch a smart pitcher like Maddux or Moyer work his magic and never get tired of seeing it.
Where a flamethrower owes his ability to hard work and a LOT of luck, being blessed by good genetics, a crafty pitcher owes their skills to smarts, an understanding of the game, and tons of hard work. So I sort of appreciate the crafty pitchers more.
Maybe the best current crafty righty is Shaun Marcum. 86.9 avg fastball and 3.57 FIP. He is the king of giving up the 300 foot flyball, batter flips his bat, drops his head and trots towards first with the final destination of the dugout.
Obviously, results wouldn’t equal Maddux but he also never had the fastball velocity that Mad Dog had.
Maddux had very good stuff, too. To be sure, by all accounts he studied the game, knew his matchups, and worked on his command. And he mixed his pitches well enough to keep hitters off-balance without throwing many breaking balls. But the movement on his pitches is not to be discounted as stuff! You don’t get the ground ball rates he got without great movement. And why did he have such great movement? He had great hands. I mean, great, big hands for a guy his size. It isn’t physically possible for a guy with little hands to pitch like Maddux. Just like it isn’t physically possible for a short guy to pitch like Randy Johnson, but that’s easier to spot on TV.
True.
Ever read Maddux’s high school scouting report?
Outstanding command and control and pitch quality as a prep. Top 10 1st rd pick recommendation.
I don’t know why we view “marksmanship” as being a hard-earned skill while velocity is a “gift from the gods”. It’s not as if intellectual giants simply did more homework than everyone else. There are athletic gifts other than running speed, power, etc.
Mark Buehrle would be an elite level crafty lefty.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that command and pitch movement is due to “hard work” and “practice”.
There are guys that have been able to hit their spots pretty much from the time they first picked up a baseball.
There are guys that threw a great changeup the first day they tried it.
Pitching command, like QB accuracy, seems to be more of a trait, than a skill. If it weren’t, it would be something that more guys attained at a mastery level.
It’s not like Greg Maddux practices location and movement twice as much as other pitchers, he’s just able to hit his spots better.
The thing is Maddux had a lot of hard work and a great cerebral and also a lot of physical ability. You can be good enough to play in the majors with just one but you can’t be as good as Greg Maddux was.
It’s the same for a lot of players. Billy Ripken could have worked just as hard as his brother, and it wouldn’t have made him as good because Cal was built bigger and stronger than he was.
Every hard-working guy in Major League had physical gifts that separated him from the other hard workers. And all the true elites have even better physical gifts, although many of them took it to the next level with their work ethic and mental game.
Take someone like Barry Bonds – even if you had someone as smart and hard-working as Bonds, and then gave him performance-enhancing drugs, he’d still never get to that level unless he was a once-in-a-decade physical talent in the first place.
But getting back to Maddux – few pitchers would be able to match his location with any amount of work. But he did do more with that location than anyone else would have, and that was due to his mental talent, focus and preparation. Some people forget that mental ability is a talent – we’re obviously aware of it when it comes to chess or poker players, but when it comes to baseball people often just chalk it up to coaching or discipline.
Andy Pettitte always seemed like the picture of a crafy lefty to me. It’s not so much the lack of strike outs–Pettitte rang up his share of Ks–but the artistry of his game. When he was “on,” he would paint the strike zone, moving the ball around all edges of the zone, and keeping the hitter off balance with his pitch selection.
IMO, what made Andy Pettitte so damn effective was that he used his cutter to pitch inside to RHBs, when the trend was for LHPs to “stay away”.
Pettitite had good velocity as well.
Didn’t Chris McManus publish a book where he claimed left handed people were smarter than righties?
I don’t think that view is generally accepted, but you never know…
… and we make better lovers.
100% true.
I always wondered, would a knuckleballing lefty be the craftiest, or least crafty lefty?
That could never happen.
Throwing a knuckleball left-handed, with the brim of the cap turned slightly to the right (because we always put our hat on with our right hand) would be the equivalent of two Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks occurring at the same time … the universe would implode.
Really disagree with strikeouts as the guideline for crafty. Guys who use contact as part of their overall strategy are often crafty. Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, Tim Hudson, Jamie Moyer, Livan Hernandez, are pitchers who are generally considered crafty – none were strikeout kings (and all except Livan outperformed their FIP, except for Livan who’s even*)
I think you’re gonna get pitchers with good movement and good secondary pitches using your method. That’s how you get strikeouts without velocity, or more than usual strikeouts with velocity. Essentially, the pitchers with the nastiest stuff.
Is Lincecum the craftiest pitcher in baseball? Few would say that he is.Does he have the nastiest stuff in baseball? He’s definitely in the conversation.
I’d say crafty pitchers limit runs without velocity – however they get it done. I’d like to see what this looks like with ERA rather than strikeouts (and yes, ERA rather than FIP or xFIP because, again, some crafty pitchers are doing things FIP is missing.)
*Which is one reason you’ve got to look beyond pitching WAR for some guys.
I would like to see a prominent lefty thrower (early Armando Benitez style) who doesn’t know how to pitch, just so see what the comments would be like. Would he still be called crafty on those occasions where he’d get somebody fooled? Or would people call it like they see it. “He’s a craftless lefty. Just a big dumb guy who throws a baseball hard. No craft at all.”
John Rocker?
Mitch Williams.
He’s the lefty’s lefty.
I have long suspected that a reason that right-handed hitters are less disadvantaged against same-hand pitching than left-handed hitters is selection bias. That is, in order to make it to the major leagues, right-handed hitters have to demonstrate a lot of skill against right-handed pitchers because right-handed pitchers are so common. Left-handed hitters, by contrast, can get away with not hitting left-handed pitchers particularly well. Just a thought.
Yeah I’ve thought about this as well.
How about Charlie Leibrandt? I always enjoyed watching him pitch. Or Woodie Fryman?
Handedness is largely genetic and left handedness is a recessive trait that is linked to a number of other recessive traits. In massive studies of driving habits/IQs/mental health etc lefties show much more volatility amongst themselves than righties. One consequence of this is that us lefties are awesome at a lot of stuff (or are in prison/dead/committed) – such as hitting. Interestingly none of this has ever been traced to hemispheric lateralization, which while real does not mean much in terms of mental ability.
And with that I still agree with the scarcity sentiment.
I believe that the lefty-lefty platoon split is more pronounced than the righty-righty for two main reasons. The first is that it’s less important that a lefty be able to hit lefties than that a righty be able to hit righties. Each group is going to face way more righties than anything else, so anyone who can’t hit righties is pretty useless, and anyone who can hit righties well is useful. In the case of a left handed batter, who has an advantage against righties, he may hit well enough against the majority of pitchers that it gets overlooked that he can’t hit against the minority. Andre Ethier can’t hit lefties for beans, but he hits righties well enough that he’s been solidly above average all in all.
The second reason is just that hitters get less practice against left handed pitching. Righties get a lot of practice against pitcher who they have a disadvantage against, and little against those they have an advantage against, which should make their splits converge. Lefties have an inherent disadvantage against left handed pitching and they get less practice against them, thus the larger split.
One thing people neglect to mention is that crafty applies to leftys a bit more due to the fact a slower pitching righty still leaves the ball in a right handed batters hitting plane longer. The flight of a left handed pitchers breaking stuff is diametrically opposed to a righthander. You have to be more exact on your target or, you beat it into the ground or pop it up. Righty on righty is will stay in a intersectional pattern longer. That’s part of the reason the cutter and screwball are so effective. They break in a reverse pattern of the natural flight of the ball. This also adds to the number factors as there are more right handed hitters as well as pitchers.