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.
Matt is the associate editor of FanGraphs. Previously, he was the baseball editor at Sports Illustrated. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Health, Baseball Prospectus, and Lindy’s Sports Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @ByMattMartell and Blue Sky @mattmartell.bsky.social.
That question about rewinding the clock on the Angels is interesting. A list of teams who provided the most PAs to players over the age of 30 last year:
Dodgers (4993)
Phillies (3885)
Mets (3450)
Padres (3350)
Mariners (3190)
Rangers (3023)
This list is kind of dull because this is a group of teams that had most of these players 3 years ago and they were mostly really, really good teams back then. The exception is the Mariners, and it’s not clear that rewinding the clock to 2023 would have helped them that much, especially since the pitching was weaker.
Now if you could assemble a team of players who were available this year based on what they did in 2022 or 2023, you could have a pretty good one. Especially 2022.
For this exercise let’s only pick players entering their age 34 year or older this upcoming year–this means we’re taking guys who have likely already peaked in 2022, so no Dylan Cease or Zac Gallen or Framber Valdez. I’ll put my team in a reply.
Here’s my team. I can only assemble it with free agents or players who were readily available this offseason, so if they’re retiring / retired I can’t use them. And 2026 has to be their age 34 season or older.
The 2022 versions of Verlander, Scherzer, Jose Quintana, Tyler Anderson, and Merrill Kelly would be an awesome rotation. Miles Mikolas and Chris Bassitt were solid innings-eaters in 2022, and they wouldn’t even make the rotation.
Raisel Iglesias, Chris Martin and Liam Hendriks would be a strong late game trio, and left-handers Taylor Rogers and Hoby Milner would help balance the bullpen.
2022 Paul Goldschmidt would anchor the lineup with his 175 wRC+, and the rest of the infield would be fantastic with Eugenio Suarez and Jeff McNeil, with Miguel Rojas being the weak link at shortstop. JT Realmuto would be the catcher.
In the outfield you would have Starling Marte in one corner. Adolis Garcia would play somewhere most days, he could platoon with Yastrzemski in CF and then move to a corner spot when Yastrzemski is playing CF. I think 2022 is probably the last year you could get away with them playing CF though. Hard to find center fielders, it’s a young man’s position. I think Rafael Ortega is still available to serve as a fifth outfielder? I don’t think he retired.
The lineup is too heavy on the right handed side. I’ve only got McNeil and Yastrzemski here, and Rafael Ortega as a backup. And Chris Taylor and Jose Iglesias are the strongest options for utility guys. Guys like Brandon Crawford and David Peralta aren’t available anymore. Might need to have Adam Frazier on hand just to give the lineup some more balance. I bet the Rangers would trade me Joc Pederson though, so I’ll pencil him in as my platoon DH.
Is this the team that would have the biggest difference between their expected 2026 performance and what we would get out of their 2022 performance? I think it would be, at least if you put in Mikolas over Merrill Kelly.
The other most famous lefty that is really a righty is Phil Mickelson, who learned to swing lefty by mirroring his brother.
As for Pete LaCock, not only is his name redundant, but, his Dad was Peter Marshall, who was the host of the original Hollywood Squares..the one with Paul Lynde, Rich Little, etc.
Ted Williams was a natural righty! He started batting lefty because as a youth he played on a diamond with such a short left field anything hit over it was a double. And he wanted to hit home runs so switched to lefty. He believed he would have been an even better hitter if he stuck with righty. Facing more same-handed pitching would have hurt but he also would not have faced such an extreme shift.
He hit .406 as a 22 year old, then Lou Boudreau rolled out the shift against him halfway through the next season – he lost .120 of OPS that season (post-shift compared to pre-shift). Then the next three seasons in the military training to be a pilot.
My current favorite Williams fact is when he came back from Korea he spent a couple weeks swinging the bat then jumped into playing time. After 18 months without baseball, and with no spring training, he hit .407/.509/.901 with 13 home runs in 37 games. Yogi Berra said something to the effect of “he didn’t come back the same player – he came back better”.
It’s safe to assume he lost 42+ WAR and close to 150 home runs in the almost five seasons of military service. Neither of those numbers get him to Ruth but the career WAR would put him close to #2 with Walter Johnson. I’m comfortable calling Williams the greatest natural righty who batted lefty.
Rickey Henderson was a natural lefty, but batted right handed because nobody taught him how to swing left handed as a kid and he was so good he stuck with it.
This is roughly analogous to the Princess Bride “I am not left-handed” scene, except applied to Rickey Henderson’s whole freaking career. He gave the entire league a handicap and he still was impossible to get out. And on top of that, he would have the platoon advantage against twice as many pitchers and would have had a small head start getting to first base.
His career OBP was .401 and he scored more runs and stole more bases than anyone else in baseball history, who knows what it would have been if he had been taught to bat by a left handed person and was getting on base 10-15% more often.
My father was a lefty who played golf as a righty because when he started playing in the 1950’s, left handed clubs cost more and my grandfather wouldn’t spring for the more expensive left handed set.
Ha! My Dad was a lefty who was forced to do everything righty because that’s how they did it when/where he was growing up in the 1920’s/30’s.
As it is, I do half of things lefty (writing, eating, racquet sports, cutting, etc) but do a bunch of stuff righty (throw, hit, shoot/dribble a basketball, golf, etc).
The stuff I do righty are things I learned between ages 4-8 that I learned by mirroring my older brother, who is right handed.
Field hockey sticks are right-handed only, so there is at least one one-sided stick-and-ball sport.
Aww thanks, Michael. For all the interesting food-for-thought you and the rest of FanGraphs offers me, glad I could offer something back. (Mish works; Transmission, I didn’t quite realize when I adopted it decades ago, might be shortened in a way that gives people an inaccurate impression of me.)
If I had added a corollary, it would have been “and everyone is so left-hand dominant that it’s functionally impossible to ever successfully switch-hit or switch-pitch.” But I appreciate and like where you went with it, thanks for working through the thought experiment!
I’m pretty sure Andrew meant to include (or should have) the score in the definition of the “Ultimate ABS Challenge” — one of those two outcomes should end the game, which means that it should be either tied or the home team should be trailing by 1. There’s nothing “ultimate” about the bases being loaded if the game is 10-0…
Statcast doesn’t seem to me to allow a filter on the margin, though. “Go-ahead run on base” almost gets there but also includes 2-run margins. Manually counting, then, I see 10 remaining hits in the last 6 years (out of the 23), and none of them end up close, with the Busaukas/Rosario case (in a tied game) you mentioned the closest.
Relatedly, we almost saw a whole season end on a replay review – can you imagine if the World Series ended when IKF slid home and they changed the call to “safe”? He would’ve had to have been safe by ten feet for them to overturn that call.
With the birthday question… is this a weird one where you’d actually expect this to happen far more often than you’d think. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you’d expect there to be a major league team with two guys born on the same day on the 26 man roster.
The birthday paradox says that in a group of 23 people, there is a 50-50 chance that there are two people who share a birthday. So we’d expect half (or just over) of MLB teams to have (at least) two players who share a birthday – that’s 15 teams. I think the chances of any two players being the same age is higher than 1 in 15 (while the age spread of major league players is wider than 15 years, there are very few at the extreme ends, most players are in their mid to late twenties or early thirties). Multiplying together gives an answer above 1.
Imagine Randy Johnson facing nothing but lefties his entire career. He would have dozens of no hitters.
I have decided to try and work this out.
Amazingly he didn’t have huge splits during the two years where he was incredible (2002, 2004) and they were listed on FG. But since probably the only left-handed hitters who got to face him more than a couple of times were Barry Bonds and Todd Helton, having even splits was probably pretty amazing.
But one thing that’s interesting about this is that part of the reason why his splits weren’t that great was because he kept hitting left handed batters.
He only faced 163 left handed hitters in 2004, because why would anyone let a left handed hitter face Johnson unless it was a guy who could do serious damage? He only gave up 24 hits against them. He also had 7 walks, one intentional walk, and 7 HBPs. That’s right, he only gave up 3x the number of hits that he had for hit batsmen.
He faced 964 batters that year. They probably would have let him pitch for another 35 innings or so if he wasn’t getting hits, although they might pull him earlier in other games to keep him from getting overworked. So he’d probably face about 1100 batters with another 35 innings.
Opposing left-handed hitters had a .162 average against him in 2004, but remember he’s walking or hitting batters something like 8% of the time, so he would only have about 1000 at-bats. If we extend it out, he would have given up 162 hits that year.
He would have averaged fewer than four hits per game. He already had one perfect game though, so let’s just redistribute those hits or whatever it is to the other 34 games. He would have 4.7, approximately hits per game. That’s compared to the roughly 5.2 hits per game that he actually gave up.
We’re probably looking at losing about 1.5 hits per game on average. I count 12 games where he went 7 or more innings and gave up only 1 hit. Let’s assume half of those turn into no-hitters.
I count another 21 games where he went at least 7 innings and gave up only two hits. Probably only 15% of those go to no-hitters, but that’s another 3 games.
My best estimate is that Randy Johnson, facing a league of hitters that is much better than the hitters he would have actually faced, would have had 9 additional no-hitters in his career, plus the one he already had and the perfect game.
It would likely be the best AVG+ from 1951 to the present with a minimum of 150 innings pitched, since he already had an AVG+ of 75 that year and we’re taking about a fifth off of that, he’d be down below Pedro’s 61 in 2000.
He also would have hit 44 batters each year. From 1951 to the present, the highest number of hit batters was Tom Murphy and Kerry Wood, who are tied at 21. With how hard he threw, someone probably would have died.
Thank you so much!
Upon reflection, maybe I’m understating things because 2004 Barry Bonds was like 10% of the left handed batters he faced that year. He didn’t face many weak left handed hitters. If the whole league was left handed, he would have been facing guys with a wRC+ of 100 instead of 115 or whatever it was.
OK you have to put a trigger warning for Pirates fans on any table containing Jose Bautista and Rajai Davis, participants in two of the most traumatic trades in franchise history.
Matt, you say in your opening remarks:
“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.“
I completely concur. Attending WBC games is a cultural experience as much as it’s a baseball experience, particularly with the players and fans from the Latin countries. My wife, who is a baseball fan only by osmosis, enjoys attending WBC games almost as much as I do. If you think you might enjoy it, by all means go!
The bases loaded, bottom of 9th or later, score tied, two outs situation is of course also the classic “why are you standing in the ondeck circle?” scenario.