Is There a Nefarious Plot Against the Right-Handed?

Behold, a table. Does anything strike you as odd about this leaderboard?

Some of those guys are just the best relievers in baseball and have been for a while. We’ve also got a couple breakout relief aces from this season, including Brent Headrick, Erik Sabrowski, and Samy Natera Jr., who is apparently not the lead singer from Chicago. Don’t feel bad, it’s an easy mistake to make.

Here’s the answer: Nine of those 15 pitchers are left-handed. Actually, there are five more lefties (Jacob Latz, Aroldis Chapman, Will Dion, Adrian Morejon, and Gregory Soto) in the top 25.

You’re probably familiar with the genre of graph that tracks the percentage of the population that’s left-handed over time; as it became less socially acceptable for schoolteachers to beat children for writing with their left hand, more people grew up as lefties. You’ll find that anecdote used as a metaphor in any number of social causes nowadays. If you don’t remember knowing anyone who was trans, or autistic, or clinically depressed in the 1960s, it’s not because those kinds of people hadn’t been invented yet. They either went unidentified or were pressured into hiding through social stigma.

But let’s unfold and reverse that caricature. Maybe the schools and the godless Marxists in the media aren’t indoctrinating every young relief pitcher to be gay, but they are indoctrinating them to be left-handed.

This season, 662 pitchers have thrown at least one inning out of the bullpen; only 174, or 26%, are lefties. Left-handers have accounted for almost exactly 30% of relief innings pitched and 29.8% of batters faced.

Whether that represents a deviation from the historical norm honestly depends on how far you zoom in on the line graph:

Oh my God, the lefties are coming in and taking all our relief pitcher jobs! By 2040, it’ll be illegal to be right-handed in a major league bullpen!

Or, this recent upswing is noticeable, but within the bounds of what has been considered normal in the era of the one-inning relief pitcher.

Even if there were some kind of sinister Boys From Brazil-type plot to cultivate an army of Eddie Guardado clones, it has not yet come to the kind of fruition that would produce the leaderboard from the top of this post.

The cool thing about this group of strikeout-heavy lefty relievers is how eclectic they are:

It’s mostly, but not exclusively, over-the-top and high-three-quarters guys. But beyond that we have a little bit of everything. We’ve got hard throwers and soft tossers, four-seamer backspin specialists, sinker-slider guys, the whole lot. We’ve got pitchers with good command, and also Brendon Little.

I’ve written about enough of these over-the-top lefties this year to acknowledge that there’s a trend in pitcher development. In addition to Sabrowski, there’s Latz and Dylan Lee, whom Ben Clemens tackled back in May.

I’ll just pull back the curtain and reveal my working hypothesis: With the three-batter minimum and the gradual de-emphasis of the designated closer, the lefty specialist is all but dead as a dedicated bullpen role. Good left-handed pitchers are therefore freed up to be used as more general relief aces or stoppers. Furthermore, because the high-arm-angle guys tend to pitch more vertically — i.e., rising fastball and diving breaking pitch, with fairly little side-to-side movement — they’re less susceptible to platoon effects. Therefore, managers are comfortable using them anytime. As they face more right-handed hitters, they become more comfortable doing so, and develop tools to combat them, perpetuating the cycle of lefties who can get righties out.

So what I expected was to find an increase, over the past five years, in the percentage of plate appearances that pitted a left-handed relief pitcher against a right-handed hitter.

I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis, don’t you?

Yeah, turns out that hypothesis was dead wrong. All relievers are facing more lefties than ever; in fact, this year, for the first time since at least 2002, right-handed relievers have faced more left-handed hitters than righties.

And that’s not just an effect of managers calling on left-handed hitters to face right-handed relievers, either. From 2008, the first year of the pitch tracking era, to 2025, left-handed hitters saw between 40% and 45% of all the pitches thrown in the major leagues. (Actually, between 39.9% and 44.8%, if we’re being precise.)

This year, 49.0% of all pitches thrown in the majors have been to left-handed hitters:

The deep state might not be turning the pitchers left-handed, but they’re definitely turning the hitters left-handed:

Switch-hitting, which reached a historical nadir in 2021, is back on the rise, but most of all, we’re getting fewer pure right-handed hitters and more pure left-handed hitters. This year, only 54.1% of players with at least one plate appearance bat solely right-handed, the lowest mark of the Wild Card era. Conversely, 34.3% of hitters bat solely left-handed, which is the second-highest mark of the Wild Card era. The only more left-handed-hitting year since 1995 was last season. In the late 1990s, it was common to have between 25% and 27% of the league hit left-handed.

Leo Morgenstern flagged this back in June, when there were more qualified left-handed hitters than right-handed hitters. That’d be a first in modern major league history if those numbers hold, and in the past three months, lefties have only increased their lead: 65 of them are on pace to qualify for the batting title, compared to just 57 righties. That’s up from the 73-71 lefty-righty-margin from when Leo checked in on the issue. Leo also noted that an extremely lefty-heavy rookie class was skewing the numbers.

That’s only become more evident as the season has gone on. This year, 60% of plate appearances taken by rookies have gone to left-handed hitters. Even if you don’t count the 9% of rookie plate appearances from switch-hitters, rookie lefties are getting almost twice as much playing time as their right-handed-hitting classmates.

Last year, right-handed-hitting rookies took 3,347 more plate appearances than left-handed-hitting rookies. This year, lefties have taken 5,415 more plate appearances. That difference alone is enough to explain this year’s record proportion of pitches seen by left-handed hitters.

So far this season, 55 rookies have batted at least 100 times in the majors. Seven are switch-hitters. Only five throw left-handed. Almost exactly half — 27 out of 55 — throw right-handed and bat left-handed. That list includes Kevin McGonigle, JJ Wetherholt, Carson Benge, Munetaka Murakami, Travis Bazzana, Justin Crawford, and Samuel Basallo. Of the top 20 rookie hitters in plate appearances this year, a staggering 14 are bats-left/throws-right.

I was ready to launch into a diatribe about showcase-poisoned helicopter parents Press Maraviching their kids into the ideal combination of batting side and throwing hand, but this might be a one-year aberration. In this year’s draft, 20 position players went in the first 30 picks; only five of those were bats-left/throws-right.

So maybe this is a blip. But it’s a jarring one. Sometimes, you sit down intending to write about Mason Montgomery and make a bad Peter Cetera joke, and end up someplace completely unintended.