Low and Away Crushes Lefties. Mostly, at Least.
Sabermetrics has had all kinds of effects on the baseball world. One of the big ones, for me at least, is that it’s changed the way I listen to announcers almost completely. When I was younger, they were my only gateway to understanding the game, so I treated every pearl of analyst wisdom like a fundamental truth of the game.
That’s simply not the case anymore. Obviously so, in my case: It would be pretty embarrassing for me if I wrote about baseball five days a week for years and still used announcers as my only source of knowledge. Even before I was a writer, however, I was a consumer of baseball writing and analysis, and the sheer deluge of data and thinking has long weaned me from needing to get my learning exclusively in the form of pronouncements from on high.
One thing that gets missed in the rush to overthrow the old order and install new quantifiable gods and goddesses of baseball truth, though, is that a lot of the things announcers taught me when I was a kid are true! It really is important to hit the cutoff man, and some fastballs do really look like they’re rising as they cross the plate. I’ve been looking into another such piece of received wisdom recently, and it’s absolutely real: lefty batters struggle to hit pitches on the low and away corner.
You know the pitch I’m talking about, because you can picture Cody Bellinger taking a defensive swing in your mind’s eye:
Or Juan Soto taking a borderline pitch and grimacing or shuffling appropriately:
Instinctively, I was sure that this was true, but I couldn’t exactly explain why. What is it about lefties that makes their swing look awkward in that location? I simply couldn’t tell you, and so I began to doubt myself. Is it really an unhittable spot, or was I falling victim to the same old thing from my youth, over-relying on something I’d been told without proving it myself? Read the rest of this entry »