Why one of baseball’s unique skills, switch-hitting, is in danger of extinction

CLEVELAND – Francisco Lindor is a natural right-handed hitter who, as a child, desperately wanted to switch shots to be more like his heroes. His brother and his cousin were both switch hitters, as was his favorite player, Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar.

Lindor begged his father, Miguel, to bat left-handed. Miguel fought it for years because Lindor was such a good hitter from the right side. Why deliberately make yourself worse by doing something so unnatural? There was no point.

“That was my dad’s way of forcing me to practice,” Lindor said. “If I did everything right, I could hit from the left side.”

Now Lindor is part of a shrinking group of players. Switch hitters are a dying breed in the major leagues, especially among Americans.

Of the approximately 550 batters who appeared at the plate through the end of June, only 58 were switch hitters, according to Stathead. It continues a trend from last season, when the number of switch hitters in baseball plummeted to the lowest number in 50 years.

Only 26 of those are American-born players, one more than last year, which saw the lowest number among Americans in nearly 60 years.

While Latin American players are often encouraged to switch hits as children, it has become almost taboo among America’s youth. Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais spent 11 years as a right-handed catcher in the majors. He believes that being a switch hitter is the biggest advantage in all of sports.

“Youth baseball in our country has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years,” said Servais. “The focus ultimately comes down to scholarships or professional football, and the lack of patience to allow those things to develop in young players. So they get on Select teams and travel all over the country and mum and dad pay a lot of money to put you in front of all the top coaches. Why would we ever put you in a situation where you could fail? And you’re going to fail. Switch hitting is really hard. It’s really hard when you’re young. And they are afraid of failure.”

Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who had to convince his father to let him switch hits, is part of a shrinking number of Major Leaguers who can hit from either side. (Charles LeClaire/USA Today)

Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh isn’t sure which side of the plate is his natural side. Raleigh, like Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman, is a three-time world scoring combination of a switch-hitting catcher with power. He has always been right-hand dominant in everyday activities, but from his earliest memories of baseball, the slugging catcher could swing the bat from both sides of the plate because his father made him do it that way.

“Every day I thank the Lord that my dad made me a switch hitter,” Raleigh said. “Because I see some of those nasty things being thrown up there.”

The number of switch hitters in baseball has declined over the past decade, eventually reaching a low point last year, when only 63 of the more than 650 players on both sides of the plate recorded at-bats. That’s down from the all-time record of 111 switch hitters in 1998. According to Stathead, American-born switch hitters peaked at 78 in 1987.

Carlos Beltrán was a rookie with the Kansas City Royals during baseball’s peak. He played for 20 years and hit 438 home runs as one of the best switch hitters of his era. He started toying with the idea after playing winter ball in Puerto Rico with Bernie Williams, who also traded hits. Beltrán had so much trouble staying on offspeed pitches and breaking balls that he wanted to give up and go back to hitting exclusively right-handed.Kevin Long, now the Phillies hitting coach, was with Beltrán in the minors and encouraged him to stick around.

“Thank God for Kevin Long,” Beltrán said. “He said, ‘We’re so close. Let’s stick with it. Keep trying.’ I was grateful that I had a coach who believed what I was doing was the right thing. And he wouldn’t really let me go back to the right side. I don’t know what my career would have been like if I had just been a right-handed hitter.”

Carlos Beltran credits Kevin Long for encouraging him to persevere in the minors when he was struggling to hit left-handed. (Bob Levey/Getty Images)

Baseball has changed dramatically since Beltrán played. The game is more specialized, even at the youth level, as players hunt for data and advanced statistics. The changes are leaving some of the greats of the past confused.

“This generation has lost the ability to hit,” says former Reds star Eric Davis, now a special assistant and roving instructor for the club. “You have a lot of guys today who are caught up in exit velocity and launch angle, and they’re not taught how to hit. They’re not good hitters. So the game will not bless them unless you develop the skill to play the game for a long time. And switch hitting is a way for some guys to play the game for a long time.

Davis, who hit right-handed during his 17 seasons in the Majors, switched hits early in his career but said he gave up as a minor leaguer because his coaches told him he had no trouble hitting sliders. The majority of switch hitters are born right-handers who learned to hit left-handed. The biggest advantage is that you can hit sliders from right-handed pitchers that break toward the left-handed hitter, rather than trying to hit pitches that leave as a right-hander.

In youth leagues, however, pitchers don’t throw a breaking pitch until they are teenagers, and most don’t develop much movement until they get closer to high school. It causes kids to struggle to hit from a side of the plate where they don’t feel comfortable and have no success. And they do it to achieve breaking pitches that won’t actually break dramatically until years later.

There is no magic age to start switching hitting, but several hitters and coaches surveyed on the subject believe that the right age to start ranges from 9 or 10 years old to about 13 years old. Beltran, who started switch-hitting in the minor leagues, is the rare exception. For teens who wait until high school, it’s often too late.

“If you have trouble with sliders and want the ball to come toward you instead of away from you, work on becoming a switch hitter,” says Cleveland Guardians veteran coach Sandy Alomar Jr., who played as a catcher in the Majors for twenty years. . Alomar emerged as a switch hitter, just like his brother Roberto. His father made sure that both boys switched hits at a young age. Sandy dropped his first year in the minors left-handed, while Roberto collected 2,724 hits, 210 home runs and 12 straight All-Star appearances as one of the greatest switch hitters of all time. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Cleveland’s Rutschman, Lindor and José Ramírez are among the best switch hitters in the game today. Ramírez made his sixth All-Star team this year and Rutschman made his second. Lindor didn’t make the team, but his season was good enough to warrant another All-Star bid.

Guardians third baseman José Ramírez, who participated in this year’s Home Run Derby, is among baseball’s best current switch hitters. (Jerome Miron/USA Today)

Reds third baseman Jeimer Candelario is one of the few American-born switch hitters, but he actually skews the numbers a bit. Candelario counts on the American side because he was born in New York City, but his father moved the family to the Dominican Republic at the age of 5 to open a baseball academy. Candelario worked on a plan developed by his father to hit from both sides of the plate every day as a child.

Latino players made up about 30 percent of Major League rosters last year. They made up more than 60 percent of all switch hitters.

“It is a lot of work. It’s not easy,” Candelario said. “Not every day will be perfect, but it is consistent work every day. If you don’t fall in love with it, you won’t be successful. You’ve got to love it.”

Not everyone believes in the concept. Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez, who hit .268 with 260 home runs in 17 years as a left-handed third baseman, marvels at what Lindor can do, but he doesn’t encourage others to try.

“You’re two different people, two different swings,” he said. “Because the body moves differently. You are right dominant, now you come to the left side and your right hand is at the bottom (of the bat). You train two different swings.

“You can have a right-handed at-bat and feel really good. In that same game you can go left and think, ‘Oh crap, where’s my swing?’

Alex Miklos played Division I baseball at Kent State University, where he was captain for three years and led the nation in triples in 2014. He is now co-owner of BioSport Athletics, a baseball and softball facility in suburban Cleveland that opened two years ago. ago and has trained between 900 and 1,000 athletes ranging in age from 7 through the professional ranks. Miklos estimates that about half of the players who have trained at BioSport are position players. Of those 450-500, he said about 10 have asked about hitting the switch and only three or four have consistently worked on it.

“There is no such thing as being too early. The sooner the better,” Miklos said. ‘But it’s definitely too late. It’s something you have to commit to. By the time you are 13 or 14 years old, you have developed patterns. It’s very difficult to develop that ability from the other side of the plate.”

Youth sports have become so competitive in the U.S. that kids feel like every shot matters, even at the club level or in travel leagues, Miklos said. It can be difficult for kids – and coaches – to “give away” at bats in games to work on player development, such as a right-handed hitter learning to hit left-handed.

Whether the number of switch hitters in the Major League starts to increase again, especially in the United States, will depend on how it is handled in the youth leagues in the future. The data is not encouraging.

Of the approximately 140 top baseball players listed on FanGraphs’ preseason list, ranging from Class AAA to Rookie Ball, 34 were switch hitters who had yet to debut.

Eight were Americans.

GO DEEPER

Missing Bats, Part 1: How an obsession with strikeouts upset the balance of baseball

(Photo by Francisco Lindor: Jamie Sabau/Getty Images)