The Year of the Left-Handed Hitter

Last season was the year of the left-handed pitcher. Southpaws combined for a record 142.3 WAR in 2025, and their collective 3.84 ERA was nearly half a run lower than right-handers’ 4.28 mark. That’s the largest difference between righty and lefty run prevention in recorded major league history, surpassing the gap from 1886, when lefties like Toad Ramsey, Lady Baldwin, and Cyclone Miller took the league by storm.

While the names might not have been quite as much fun to say in 2025, the pitchers were just as fun to watch. (I mean, I presume. I’m slightly too young to have seen Ramsey, Baldwin, or Miller in action.) Tarik Skubal took home his second straight Cy Young award, and Garrett Crochet made him earn it. Max Fried signed the richest contract a left-handed pitcher has ever seen, and wasted no time demonstrating why the Yankees thought him worthy of it. Cristopher Sánchez proved he belonged in the conversation with those bigger names, earning himself an extension on top of an extension this spring. And it wasn’t just the stars doing the heavy lifting. You could remove Skubal, Crochet, Fried, and Sánchez from the equation, and lefties still outperformed their right-handed counterparts by more than a third of an earned run. Simply put, left-handed pitchers dominated, and those of us watching couldn’t help but take notice.

A big reason left-handed pitchers were so successful in 2025 was how well they handled right-handed hitters. We expect lefty pitchers to dominate same-handed matchups, and they had no trouble doing so last year. Left-handed pitchers generally hold left-handed batters to a wOBA about 15 to 25 points below the overall league average. In 2025, they held them to a .292 wOBA, while the league average was .313. That’s a 21-point gap, perfectly within the typical range.

But the hard thing about being a southpaw is that you have to face right-handed hitters a lot more often than you do lefties. At least, that’s usually the hard thing. Last season, however, it wasn’t as much of a problem. Right-handed batters (excluding pitchers) produced a .31302 wOBA against left-handers in 2025; the overall league average wOBA was .31306. Of course, there’s a reason you never see wOBA written out to the hundred thousandth place; the vast majority of the time, a difference that small is meaningless. This is the exception. Even if it was only on a technicality, 2025 was the first season in more than two decades in which left-handed pitchers held right-handed batters to a wOBA below the league average. The righty batter’s long-held platoon advantage was gone.

The wOBA figures in the table below (don’t worry, these ones are expressed to a normal decimal place) should help to put that in context. Left-handed pitchers had been slowly improving against right-handed batters for a few years, but in 2025, they finally succeeded in neutralizing their opposite-handed foes:

Baseball is famously a game of adjustments, but even so, I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see such a dramatic reaction to the year of the left-handed pitcher materialize so quickly. Because I think that’s a likely explanation for what’s happening so far in 2026. Last year was the year of the left-handed pitcher. This year, it’s left-handed hitters dominating the game.

Entering play Monday, major league batters have hit left-handed in 35,855 out of 74,104 plate appearances – more than 48%. That rate has been rising for the last four years, but this season’s increase represents the largest year-over-year change since at least 2002, which is as far back as the FanGraphs splits leaderboards go. This is far and away the closest the league has come to an even righty-lefty split at the plate in the past 25 years:

The chart above shows the percentage of all major league plate appearances taken from the left-hand side (in other words, by left-handed hitters or switch-hitters batting left-handed) in each of the last 25 seasons. The outlier is obvious, as outliers typically are. I should note that I excluded pitchers. That didn’t have much of an effect on the overall numbers, but it was how I learned that Jose Trevino has pitched enough that he’s tagged as a pitcher on our leaderboards and gets removed from the data set when I select the “non-pitchers” option (Shohei Ohtani remains, in case you were concerned).

“If this continues over the rest of the season” is a dangerous phrase to utter a week into June. Still, this is a big enough change that it’s worth talking about even if it doesn’t hold, and given the magnitude of the shift, I think it probably will. Batters took 47.6% of their plate appearances from the left side in March/April this season. At the time, that was the highest left-handed plate appearance rate in any individual “month” dating back to 2002. That’s 142 months of baseball. (Or, more accurately, 142 baseball months, from Mapril to Octember.) None of the previous 141 came particularly close to matching this March/April. The previous high was in May 2012, when non-pitchers hit left-handed in 46.3% of their plate appearances. This year’s lefty batters smashed past a high mark that had stood for 14 years. Then they kept going:

This May, hitters took 48.8% of their plate appearances from the left-hand side. That’s 1.2 percentage points higher than the rate in March/April, which was already 1.3 points higher than the highest rate in any prior month. And lest you think I’m ignoring the first few days of June because they don’t support my argument, batters have hit lefty 50.39% of the time this month. At this rate, right-handed hitting might be obsolete by October!

I also want to stress that the year of the left-handed hitter isn’t just about playing time. The production is there too. Left-handed batters are on pace to reach base more often and drive in more runs than in any season since at least 2002:

This shouldn’t be too surprising. More plate appearances are going to mean more opportunities to impact games. The kicker is that left-handed hitters aren’t just breaking their own records – they’re starting to outproduce righties. Lefty batters finished March/April with 2,095 weighted runs created (wRC), their most in any month covered by our splits leaderboard, but still 43 runs back of their right-handed counterparts. Then, in May, lefties finally did it. For the first time on record, they outproduced righties over an entire calendar month. While they were still at a slight playing time disadvantage, lefty batters outhit righties so convincingly (.322 wOBA vs. .303 wOBA) that quality beat quantity. In 760 fewer trips to the plate, lefties outproduced righties by more than 150 runs of value. A week into June, the lefties are holding strong:

As I suggested earlier, I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that lefty batters are suddenly seeing a spike in plate appearances following the year of the left-handed pitcher. In 2025, right-handed hitters couldn’t catch a break. They were below league average against right-handed pitchers (as usual) and ever so slightly below average against left-handed pitchers as well. Thus, of the four possible hitter-handedness/pitcher-handedness combinations, only “left-handed hitter versus right-handed pitcher” was truly hitter-friendly.

Given that right-handed pitchers are much more plentiful than left-handed arms, it makes sense that teams would want to load up on lefty bats in their lineups. Right-handed pitchers typically account for 72% to 73% of batters faced. That isn’t something that has changed in 2026:

Accordingly, more lefty bats getting more plate appearances has meant hitters have had the platoon advantage more often this year:

The drawback to a lineup having too many left-handed hitters is, of course, that the platoon disadvantage is harder on lefty batters. Yet, the worse that right-handed hitters perform against left-handed pitchers, the less that drawback matters.

To that point, it’s not just that there are more lefty batters on major league rosters, but that those lefties are seeing more regular playing time. Teams are, in fact, loading their lineups with lefties. Of the 542 batters who have taken at least one plate appearance this season, 54.1% are listed as right-handed and 35.4% as left-handed. That would be the second-lowest percentage of righty batters and the highest percentage of lefty batters in a season dating back to 2002 (pitchers excluded). However, the difference between the numbers from this year and the past few years isn’t huge:

What is huge is the number of qualified left-handed hitters in 2026:

More than two months into the season, qualified lefty batters outnumber qualified righties. It’s close, and it will probably stay close until the end, but there’s a chance we’re about to witness the first season with more qualified left-handed hitters than right-handed hitters in 126 years. The last time that happened was so long ago that the rules for qualifying were completely different. I’m using modern standards for the purposes of this article, but that’s not the point — 1900 was a million years ago.

Here’s another way to think about those numbers. Less than one quarter (24.2%) of right-handed batters who have appeared in the majors in 2026 have earned enough reps to qualify for the batting title. In contrast, 38% of players listed as left-handed have taken the requisite number of plate appearances. So this isn’t simply about an increased availability of lefties. It’s about managers choosing to put their lefty options in the lineup more often. Batters listed as left-handed have accounted for 41% of all players in starting lineups this season, their highest rate in that area since, again, 1900.

Now, more playing time for lefties inevitably means less for righties, and no group of righty batters has suffered more than rookies. As of June 7, players listed as left-handed account for seven out of 10 qualified rookie batters. What’s more, nearly two-thirds of all rookie plate appearances have gone to hitters listed as left-handed. That rate has never been higher than 50% in a full season. Not just since 2002 — never.

That could almost be enough to explain the entire year of the left-handed hitter phenomenon. What if there are just a lot of new lefty batters this year? But hold on a minute. You could remove rookies from the data set, and 2026 would still be on pace for the highest rate of left-handed plate appearances in any season of the last 25 years. That’s because this isn’t just about an unusually high number of lefty-batting newbies. Rookies listed as lefties are on track for a little over 10,850 plate appearances in 2026. For context, lefty-listed rookies took 9,740 plate appearances in 2024, 10,487 in 2023, and 10,878 in 2022. So, 10,850 is a high pace, especially since it should keep climbing as more rookies make their debuts. Still, it’s not high enough to dramatically alter any league-wide figures.

On the other hand, rookies listed as batting right-handed are on pace for fewer than 5,000 trips to the plate. That’s only a little more than one per team per game. It’s barely more playing time than righty-listed rookies had in the 60-game 2020 season. The last full season in which righty-listed rookies stepped to the plate fewer than 5,000 times was 1990 – before the Rockies, Marlins, Rays, and Diamondbacks existed.

I’m sure there is a bit flukiness to all this. Some seasons, there are going to be more lefties than righties ready to play in the majors. And this year, there really are a lot of incredibly talented lefty-batting rookies. Kevin McGonigle, JJ Wetherholt, and Munetaka Murakami would be racking up plate appearances in any season. However, this is just as much (if not more) about a lack of righty rookies as it is about an abundance of lefties. Righty-listed rookies took 11,804 plate appearances in 2025. They still haven’t cracked 2,000 in 2026. More and more will debut as the year goes on, but they’d have to come up at a turbocharged rate to change the situation. The playing time numbers are just so low that I’d be surprised if this wasn’t at least somewhat tactical. Left-handed pitchers have never looked so menacing. Is that why teams are more hesitant to send their least-experienced batters up to face them?

To that end, this really is a league-wide trend, not just a few forward-thinking or lefty-heavy teams skewing the data. When it comes to the percentage of plate appearances taken from the left-hand side in 2026, all but eight teams fall within one standard deviation of the mean, four on each side.

The Astros are the biggest outlier on the righty-heavy end, which makes sense; because of the Crawford Boxes, they have skewed right-handed for years. Meanwhile, the Guardians are leading the charge when it comes to left-handed batters, but that’s nothing new either. They’ve been on this train for a long time, and the rest of the league is finally hopping on. Over the last 25 seasons, Cleveland is the one team that has taken more than half of its plate appearances from the left-hand side. Only six teams have gone to bat lefty more than two-thirds of the time in a single season, and the Guardians account for five of them:

Left-handed hitters are raking right now. Eight of the top 10 qualified hitters by wRC+ bat left-handed: Yordan Alvarez, Ben Rice, Ohtani, Drake Baldwin, James Wood, Nick Kurtz, Murakami, and Kyle Schwarber. So do the leading Rookie of the Year contenders, McGonigle and Wetherholt. Yet, the year of the left-handed hitter is about more than just its biggest stars. Strike all those names from the record, and major league batters would still be hitting lefty at the highest rate of the last 25 years. Whether it’s forward-thinking or fortuitous, managers are starting their lefty bats more often. So far, it’s paying off.

All stats are through games on Sunday, June 7.