Why do lefties have the sweetest swings?
Braves slugger and two-time National League MVP Award winner Dale Murphy was at a loss for solutions one September day in 1988. He hadn’t gotten a success in practically every week, and he couldn’t discover a method to snap out of his hunch on the plate.
As he continued attempting to tinker along with his swing mechanics, Murphy regarded up on the tv, the place he noticed the Giants enjoying. At the plate was Giants first baseman Will Clark. As he continued watching, Murphy received into his batting stance.
“He told me he stood facing the TV,” Clark stated. “But it’s just like the reverse picture if you’re standing in a right-handed batting stance whereas being lined up with a lefty batting on TV. He stated he was a few of my swings and attempting to imitate that whereas watching the TV.
“The ultimate form of flattery is when another pro is trying to mimic you.”
Murphy wasn’t the one one. Clark, who was one of many recreation’s premier hitters within the late Nineteen Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties, had one of the stunning swings in baseball historical past, a candy stroke that drew comparisons to Stan Musial’s and was a serious cause he grew to become referred to as “Will the Thrill.”
As nice of a hitter as Murphy was, he couldn’t mimic Clark’s swing — partly due to its pristine fluidity, but additionally as a result of Murphy was right-handed.
The query has baffled baseball gamers, coaches and followers alike for so long as the sport has been performed: Why does it appear to be all of the sweetest swings belong to left-handed hitters?
“I don’t know why the lefties look … for lack of a better word, more fluid,” Clark stated.
He’s not alone in his perplexity relating to that query.
“I don’t know,” stated former Yankees slugger and present Marlins supervisor Don Mattingly, whose stunning swing from the left aspect earned him the nickname “Hit Man.” “It just looks different, I’m not quite sure why.”
“I wish I could give you a good reason,” stated 2021 Hall of Fame inductee Larry Walker, whose candy left-handed stroke produced 383 house runs over a 17-year profession with the Expos, Rockies and Cardinals.
“I don’t know why,” stated one other former Rockies slugger, Carlos González. “It just looks cool from the left side.”
Fred Lynn, one other sweet-swinging lefty who was the 1975 American League MVP, didn’t have the reply, both. But he wonders if the previous pitcher referred to as the “Spaceman” would know.
“If you asked Bill Lee,” Lynn stated with fun, “he’d probably say because the earth is spinning the opposite way from the way left-handers are swinging.”
With how flummoxed we’ve been through the years as to why this phenomenon exists, perhaps we should always look into the earth rotation concept.
Lynn, Mattingly, Clark, Walker and González are members of a fraternity of left-handed hitters all through baseball historical past who captivated us with their stunning swings. There are many others, together with Ken Griffey Jr. — who had maybe the sweetest swing of all of them — Ted Williams, Keith Hernandez, George Brett, Tony Gwynn, Mark Grace, Rafael Palmeiro, and the checklist goes on.
Even although nobody has been capable of pinpoint precisely why this phenomenon exists, it hasn’t stopped these in and across the recreation from providing up their theories.
“Maybe it’s just because there are more right-handed hitters than left-handed hitters,” Walker stated. “So when a lefty comes along it seems more rare, which makes it more sweet.”
González, whose ferocious left-handed swing was equal components assault and ballet, agreed that there appears to be a rarity issue at play.
“When you have so many right-handed hitters, everything with them becomes normal,” he stated. “But once you have someone like Griffey, who really impacted the game, with the hat backwards and the beautiful swing, the beautiful bat drop, I think that’s what captivated everybody. That’s the reality — just being rare is what gets everybody’s attention.”
As a boy rising up in Venezuela, González would beg his mom to let him keep up late at night time when native channels televised MLB video games to showcase Venezuelan gamers equivalent to Freddy Garcia and Carlos Guillen of the Mariners. A younger CarGo noticed sufficient of Griffey to start mimicking his legendary swing.
“Everything you saw from me is because of Griffey,” stated González, who was a batting champion, three-time All-Star and two-time Silver Slugger Award winner with Colorado. “Whenever there was a picture of him in a newspaper or a magazine, I used to cut it up and place it on the wall and try to emulate his swing. So that’s the way it started, and over the years I made my own adjustments, and that’s the way my CarGo swing was created.”
González stated that one of the essential components to his swing was the period of time his bat would journey by the hitting zone. His swing path maximized the bat’s publicity to that vital space, enabling him to supply hits even when he was fooled on a pitch or late on a fastball.
Clark underscored that time as a result of it was an enormous ingredient to his success as effectively.
“I was just more worried about staying on the plane of the baseball,” Clark stated. “All of the good hitters, when they came down to first base, they always talked about staying on plane with the baseball, the reason being you don’t have to have absolutely perfect timing. You can catch it a bit late, you can catch it on time, you can catch it out front — you’ve got a good chance of getting a base hit that way.”
Could that be a part of the reason for why we love lefty swings? That they are usually longer by the hitting zone, making for a extra engaging movement?
If that’s the case, why would lefties have longer swings than righties? Could or not it’s as a result of there are such a lot of extra right-handed pitchers on the market, giving left-handed hitters the benefit of getting a fraction of a second longer to see a pitch from righties?
“I’ve thought about that,” stated Lynn, the one man to hit a grand slam in an All-Star Game, launching one to proper discipline at Comiskey Park off the Giants’ Atlee Hammaker in 1983. “You see a lot of right-handed pitchers, a lot of offspeed and breaking stuff coming at you, especially if you can hit the fastball. So you have more time to look at it. When I faced lefties, I had less time because you don’t see it as well and you’re a little bit quicker with the swing because you don’t see it quite as well.”
Mattingly stated he thinks that whereas there are actually built-in benefits to being a left-handed hitter, he doesn’t understand how that will translate right into a sweeter swing.
“Hitting left-handed, you see way more righties in your life,” Mattingly stated. “That’s definitely an advantage. But I think the swing mechanics really are the same from both sides. Like you look at a guy like Manny Ramirez and then you compare him to a really good left-handed hitter — the mechanics of that are gonna look a lot alike, like with the time you touch down and when you actually get the bat through the zone.”
So if the swings are mechanically related in lots of left-handed hitters and right-handed hitters alike, why does it nonetheless appear smoother from the left aspect?
There’s one other idea that has been floated up to now, one which might be key to answering our nice query: left-handed hitters are capable of naturally go into their stride towards first base after finishing their swings, whereas right-handed hitters have to show their hips again towards the plate with a view to start their dash towards first base.
“I never thought of that,” Mattingly stated. “That is really interesting, because that’s kind of true, right? Because as a righty, you hit it and you kind of have to think about getting out of the box, and with the lefty it’s more like hitting it and then just sliding right out of the box.”
If there’s anybody who is aware of batting stances, it’s Gar Ryness, often known as “Batting Stance Guy” on Twitter — in case you’re a baseball fan, you will have seen his unimaginable impressions of various batting stances all through historical past. Surely he has contemplated the subject.
“Good question,” he stated. “If you think of where swings ‘should’ finish, the lefty is closer to starting to run to first. The righty has to abruptly stop whatever smooth swing he has and begin running to first base.”
Is there benefit to this idea? What if baseball was performed clockwise as an alternative of counterclockwise — in different phrases, what in case you ran to 3rd after placing the ball in play, quite than to first? Would the righties be the candy swingers in that world?
Believe it or not, some early types of baseball have been performed with clockwise baserunning. According to “The Book of Sports” by Robin Carver, which was revealed in 1834, the principles for “rounders,” a precursor to the trendy recreation of baseball, referred to as for clockwise baserunning.
Since we will’t return to 1834, we’ll want a bit trendy know-how to see what it’d seem like to play that type of the sport, and extra importantly, how lefties swinging after which working to first base would look as righties swinging and working to 3rd. Is the “sweetness factor” nonetheless there?
Let’s begin with the “King of Swing,” if you’ll: Griffey. If we reverse the picture on the video under, we see that Griffey’s inimitable swing stays stunning from the correct aspect as he makes his means towards first (third) base. It appears the fluid movement of going proper into his house run trot off the backswing works from each side.
We see the identical phenomenon with Clark’s swing — mirror the picture, on this case of Clark’s grand slam within the 1989 National League Championship Series in opposition to the Cubs, and it seems to be simply as easy from the correct aspect of the plate as he transitions from backswing to house run trot.
Mattingly had a candy swing, however again troubles made him hunch over whereas transferring out of the field. Other than that, the mirror picture is simply the identical by way of the swing itself.
Now, what concerning the reverse state of affairs — would a right-handed hitter look any higher from the left aspect of the plate if we mirrored the picture? Whom may we flip round in that case?
“There are some right-handers that you sit there and you look at — like you look at a guy like Edgar Martinez,” Clark stated. “And you’re like, man, that one’s awesome from the right side.”
When Clark identifies a wonderful swing, your ears perk up. So right here’s a take a look at Martinez, whose swing is as easy as silk, as if he hit lefty:
As you’ll be able to see, Martinez’s swing continues to be attractive if we flip him round, however the “smooth factor” breaks down as his ft get transferring towards first base. The movement is interrupted, as Batting Stance Guy identified.
So the place does all of this depart us?
It appears there are a number of components concerned in making the candy swings all of us love happen principally from the left aspect of the plate. Lefties are, certainly, extra uncommon — even in different sports activities, there’s typically a sense {that a} lefty is smoother than a righty, whether or not or not it’s on a quarterback’s throw (suppose Steve Young) or a jump-shot in basketball (suppose Dick Barnett, whom Lynn talked about particularly). And in lots of circumstances, lefties have longer swings by the hitting zone as a result of they’re afforded a split-second longer to see a pitch from a righty than a right-handed batter.
But essentially the most convincing idea seems to be that lefties can glide out of the batter’s field and transition instantly into their trot towards first base out of their backswing. Video proof helps it, and in an alternate universe by which baseball is performed clockwise, we’d very effectively be awestruck by the identical gamers and the identical swings as we at the moment are.
Of course, if one other variation in that alternate universe was the course by which the earth spins, who is aware of whether or not that end result would maintain? Well, the “Spaceman” most likely would.
While the metaverse is unquestionably a factor, we’re dealing in actuality right here, and doing a bit mirroring of some previous footage can go a great distance towards answering a query that has baffled the baseball world from the start.
Left-handers have at all times been within the minority on this world. But relating to baseball, they’re particular — it’s why left-handed pitchers are inclined to have longer careers than righties, for instance. The clarification for that may be a bit clearer than why lefties have the sweeter swings on the plate.
Perhaps we’re a bit bit nearer to the reply. In any case, we’ll proceed to benefit from the distinct pleasure of watching a wonderful left-handed swing.
“It’s a right-handed world,” Lynn stated. “There just aren’t that many lefties. But in baseball, when you see a certain lefty swing, it’s like, ‘Man, that’s just smooth as butter.’”
