FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: March 14, 2026
I’ve covered Red October playoff games in Philadelphia, and white out football games at Penn State. I’ve also attended professional games in Panama and covered plenty of Little League World Series games, giving me a taste of how different cultures enjoy baseball. But I have never witnessed a sporting event quite like Wednesday night’s World Baseball Classic game between the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
It wasn’t just the chanting, the instruments blaring, or the dancing that made for such an exhilarating experience; all of those things were also a part of the previous Pool D games played by the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. I know what passionate fandom looks and sounds like, and this was something altogether different. Venezuelan and Dominican fans don’t merely watch baseball; they participate in it. It’s kinetic, and when the force of their fandom collided under the closed roof of loanDepot park, it created a unique, unforgettable energy. I hope all of you reading this can experience something like it at some point in your life, because getting to feel that power pulsing through the stadium is one of the great privileges of this job.
That’s the last we’ll talk about the WBC in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions on how baseball would change if it were played exclusively left-handed, how often we might see an Ultimate ABS Challenge, and whether the 2026 Angels roster would’ve been a playoff team in 2024. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
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How would baseball change if there was no such thing as right-hand dominance? All hitters and pitchers from the game’s inception to the present performed exactly the same, except now all as left-handed throwers and hitters, exclusively?
How different would that be from a baseball universe in which everyone was exclusively right-handed?
From,
“Transmission”
Michael Baumann: I’d like to begin by saluting you, Transmission — I’m gonna call you Mish for short — for submitting the best mailbag question I’ve ever received. Better than the dog first baseman one, better than the one about why God hates the Reds. Nothing’s even close.
The first thing that comes to mind is that if everyone in the world were left-handed we would absolutely be running the bases the other way. Most obviously because of the way the infield is oriented now, three of the toughest defensive positions are incredibly awkward to play as a left-handed fielder. So much so that you never see it past the dandelion-picking levels of Little League.
I know that lefties get an advantage over righties by being closer to first base, but there’s a logic in having the batter run to the base he’s facing. The big question is whether baseball’s founding fathers would have bothered to create a right-handed batter’s box at all. And conversely, would an all-right-handed baseball league have created a left-handed batter’s box? (For what it’s worth, if everyone threw with the same hand, I don’t think it’d matter which hand it was; all-lefty baseball would look the same as all-righty baseball, just in reverse.)
But if everyone in baseball hit from the same side of the plate, pitching strategy would be enormously different than it is in our ambidextrous world. The value of the platoon advantage was understood very early on in the history of the game; switch-hitters came into existence around the same time as the baseball glove, in the 1870s.
If every player in the league were left-handed, and it was understood that hitters fared better against breaking pitches that moved toward them, would anyone have ever developed the sinker or the changeup? Probably — even now, you see pitchers whose offspeed pitches are dominant enough to be effective against same-handed hitters — but the shape and deployment would probably be different. Creating screwball action would take a backseat to deception; for that matter, maybe breaking pitches would have developed on a continuum of shape and speed, rather than being distinct, the way we separate sliders and curveballs now.
But if I had to guess, I’d say that entirely left-handed baseball would have developed symmetrical batting positions, as ambidextrous baseball has in real life. I’m not aware of a stick-and-ball sport that forces the player to address the ball from a specific side — then again, we live in a world where right-handed people exist, which would not be the case in Mish’s hypothetical.
A left-handed grip on a baseball bat — which is to say, left hand on top, right hand on the bottom — is also a left-handed grip on a variety of tools that would’ve been familiar to 19th Century Americans: axes, brooms, shovels, even swords. It stands to reason that baseball would’ve evolved along those lines.
But maybe not universally so.
When I was growing up, the kids in my neighborhood would play street hockey every afternoon, from when school got out to when it got dark. Hockey has left- and right-handed shooting positions that correspond with the batting positions of the same name. I write right-handed, I throw and hit right-handed, and I play hockey right-handed. Most of the kids I grew up with were also right-handed and played baseball right-handed, but in hockey they shot lefty.
In both baseball and hockey, the fine control of the bat or stick is done with the top hand — that’s where you want your dominant hand. But because the baseball bat is held up, the top hand is further from the knob, while the hockey stick — held close to the ground — has the top hand at the knob. In order to put the dominant hand in control of the stick, a right-handed hockey player would have to shoot lefty.
Most of my left-handed-shooting friends learned how to play hockey before they learned how to play baseball, so if they were right-handed they were taught to shoot lefty. I came to hockey later, after already having committed to a right-hand-over-left baseball grip, so I played hockey with the same hand position.
The point is, it’s easier to hit right-handed if you’re naturally right-hand dominant, but not by much. It can be learned or unlearned fairly quickly; plenty of high-level ballplayers who don’t switch-hit in games will switch-hit in practice for their own amusement.
If a right-handed batter’s box were available by rule, it would take about 10 seconds for someone to try to figure out how to gain an advantage by using it. It would start with the kind of jailbreak swing you see from left-handed fast-pitch softball players. (Remember, we’re running the bases clockwise in this hypothetical.) Before too long, an enterprising switch-hitter would realize that he was having an easier time seeing left-handed breaking pitches and commit to hitting righty full-time.
Eventually, the entire league would follow suit. If every pitcher you face is left-handed, why would you ever subject yourself to a platoon disadvantage if you could avoid it? So eventually, some left-handed pitchers would experiment with throwing righty, which would be awkward but not impossible. Remember, Billy Wagner is naturally right-handed. (So is Michael Vick, if you want a non-baseball example.)
From the start of the National League in 1876, it took 119 years for Greg Harris to come along and pitch with both arms in a single game. That was a novelty act from a pitcher on the verge of retirement; it’d be another 20 years before Pat Venditte reached the majors. Soon, Jurrangelo Cijntje will come to the majors with conventional big league-quality stuff from both sides.
In a world where every pitcher throws left-handed and every hitter is left-handed but bats righty, the evolution toward non-dominant-hand pitching would not take nearly that long. Eventually, we’d see a mix of switch-pitching and switch-hitting players, and maybe even right-handed-throwing first basemen.
From there, how long until baseball players start trying to write with their non-dominant hand, too? Would baseball bring an end to this wholly left-handed world? Is this thought experiment inherently self-negating? Fascinating stuff.
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Dear Mailbag,
Let’s define the Ultimate ABS Challenge as the following: bottom of the ninth or later, bases loaded, two outs, full count, and either a walk or a strikeout is challenged. Is it possible to estimate the likely frequency of future UABSCs? We would be looking for past walks and strikeouts in that area in which Statcast suggested the ball was within, say, 1.5 inches of the edge of the zone on either side of it, I should think.
Thanks!
Andrew
Ben Clemens: What an incredibly specific query! The answer is that this is probably going to happen almost never. Forget the distance from the borders of the strike zone. From 2021 to 2025, there were exactly 23 pitches that meet the rest of your criteria: bases loaded, bottom of the ninth or later, full count, two outs, taken for a strike or ball. Here’s a Baseball Savant search string for that.
Out of those 23 pitches, 15 were taken for balls. Those balls were all pretty far outside the strike zone. The closest one was 1.7 inches off the plate, and that’s grading generously. Statcast measures the location of the center of the ball; I, of course, included the radius of the ball in my calculations. Sure, the Cardinals would have challenged that one, but I don’t think there’d be much drama. No one on either team thought that it was a strike.
Out of the eight pitches taken for a strike, only one had a location within 1.5 inches of being overturned on a challenge. That’s this bending changeup from Tyler Holton, and it would have been overturned. The closest among the others was this slider from J.B. Bukauskas that dotted the inside corner. I’m sure Amed Rosario would have challenged it, but the truth is that it was in the zone by a lot. It’s a strike if any part of the ball clips the zone, and the center of this one was in the zone. The inside edge of this pitch was nearly two inches into the strike zone; it wouldn’t have been close to getting overturned.
In other words, you might get a few challenges – five pitches in the last five years within two inches, for example – but probably not that many overturns. Maybe zero overturns, in fact. Batters don’t get into this situation — bases loaded, 3-2 count, two outs, bottom of the ninth — very often in the first place. And I doubt they’re going to suddenly start taking more pitches either. When batters swing at close pitches in these situations, it’s not because they’re worried the ump will botch the call. Rather, it’s because they’re tracking a spinning projectile in flight, making a swing decision well before they see where it ends up, and trying to approximate a trajectory. They don’t even know exactly where the strike zone border is. I don’t think this behavior will change much at all. No one’s that good at knowing where a pitch will end up before they swing; even Juan Soto chases. I hope that we see at least a few, but I’m glad that they’ll happen pretty rarely.
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The Angels are accumulating a large number of players who were good roughly a few years ago, mostly in 2023. Some are declining vets like Jorge Soler and Mike Trout. Some are young enough guys that only had one really good year, like Josh Lowe and Alek Manoah. Some probably had really good projections some spring but never launched, like Grayson Rodriguez and Vaughn Grissom and Oswald Peraza. Some blew out their arms, like Jordan Romano and Robert Stephenson. If you took the best preseason projections in the 2022-2024 period for each player you probably have a playoff team. Could you run the projections to see if my theory is true? — Jason
Dan Szymborski: Hi, Jason, I always appreciate an attempt to make the 2026 Angels seem like an interesting team. We elected to do this exercise for the current Angels roster with their projections entering the 2024 season. You’ll see why in a moment.
The time machine 2024 Angels, in a ZiPS simulation, continue to struggle in the current AL West, though they do improve. You get better projections from Mike Trout, Logan O’Hoppe, Jorge Soler, and Nolan Schanuel, but you also lose Zach Neto’s breakout. Alek Manoah gets a bit of a boost, but both Yusei Kikuchi and José Soriano lose some of their current projected value.
In the end, it’s enough to bump the Angels from what is currently a 69-win projection to a 73-win projection, and their playoff probability from 2.9% to 9.1%, but it’s a team that would still need an awful lot of things to go right.
However, since we’re already using a time machine to violate baseball’s rules, and possibly physical laws of the universe, how about we take the approach of “in for a penny, in for a pound” and also purloin Shohei Ohtani himself entering the 2024 campaign? After all, as Tom Verducci reported in a March 2024 Sports Illustrated cover story, that might’ve happened if Arte Moreno had been willing to match the offer Ohtani got from the Dodgers, deferrals and all.
Now, with Ohtani and the pre-2024 projections, the Angels project as an 81-win team with a 32% chance of making the playoffs in 2026. If that still feels a little disappointing, you have to remember that this is a team that could give a TED Talk about how not to build a good baseball team while employing both Trout and Ohtani, which is a little like losing the Tour de France despite being allowed to use a motorcycle.
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As someone fascinated by baseball player birthdays, I loved Ben’s response last week about birthday and WAR. It reminded me that a few years ago, I noticed that then-Diamondback teammates David Peralta and Jeremy Hazelbaker were born on exactly the same day (8/14/1987). They, in fact, batted back-to-back one game. It got me to wondering if – besides twins like the O’Briens or Rogers – what other teammates born the same day ever played in the same game as teammates?
Enjoying all of the great work. — jds
Jon Becker: Fun question! Upon querying our game-by-game database, I was surprised to find that this has happened more often than I would have guessed. Teammates with the same birthday (including twins) have played in the same game 4,477 times, with 10 of the 187 distinct pairs doing so at least 100 times:
| Player 1 | Player 2 | Birthdate | Games Together |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pete LaCock | Darrell Porter | 1/17/52 | 346 |
| José Bautista | Rajai Davis | 10/19/80 | 269 |
| Tim Flannery | Craig Lefferts | 9/29/57 | 175 |
| Bob Forsch | Mike Tyson | 1/13/50 | 136 |
| Luis Salazar | Eric Show | 5/19/56 | 135 |
| Jay Johnstone | Rick Monday | 11/20/45 | 129 |
| Matt Holliday | JD Closser | 1/15/80 | 126 |
| Stephen Drew | Rusty Ryal | 3/16/83 | 122 |
| Jose Iglesias | C.J. Cron | 1/5/90 | 110 |
| Reggie Smith | Don Sutton | 4/2/45 | 108 |
Same-birthday-teammate games occurred 84 times last year alone, mostly thanks to two pairs: Brandon Nimmo and Clay Holmes, and Matt McLain and Hunter Greene. Nimmo and Holmes are no longer teammates, of course, but McLain and Greene — who’ve shared the field for the Reds 24 times already — will keep moving up the list when Greene returns from his elbow injury around midseason.
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