Are the Padres too Right Handed?

If you have been paying attention to what the baseball pundits are saying about the 2015 Padres they have been largely critical of two things, outfield defense and a right handed heavy lineup.

However, unlike many experts, I think the fact that the Padres lineup will be filled with right handed hitters won’t hurt the team in the long run. Here are the reasons why:

Several years ago I read a fantastic article that explained why, what many baseball minds consider common knowledge, that left handed hitters hit better than their right handed counterparts, was actually a myth. After some digging I was able to find that article by John Walsh of Hardball Times and I encourage all of you to read it.

Walsh explains that if you look at a career batting average, it appears as though the left handed hitters have an advantage. For example, from 2000 to 2007, lefties batted .270 and righties batted .263. Additionally, over the last 50 years, 54 of the 100 batting titles have been won by left handers and only 35 by righties (11 were switch hitters if you were checking my math).

So as Walsh points out, at a quick glance it appears as though the baseball minds are right and the lefties have an advantage, but that isn’t the whole story.

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Several reasons that people give for lefties having this so called “advantage”, is the fact that they start a couple of steps closer to first base, thus beating out more closer plays. Some people say they have the platoon advantage, meaning they face opposite-facing pitching more often. Another reason is the positional bias, as Walsh puts it, this comes down to certain defensive positions where only right handed throwers play. These positions are catcher, second base, third base and shortstop. As Walsh points out, since three of these position are defensive first positions, teams are willing to sacrifice offense for a good glove. While not all players that throw right handed bat right handed (i.e. Joe Mauer) they will work to lower the batting average for righties.

Several of these arguments may be invalid if we actually dig deeper. First, the closer to first base argument. In his article, Walsh breaks down the number of infield hits from each side of the plate and finds that right handed batters actually hit a higher percentage of infield hits (.079 % for righties and .074% for lefties). This is most likely due to the fact that lefties are more likely to hit the ball toward the right side of the infield (closer to first), and the righties are more likely to hit it toward the left side.

In the article Walsh also goes into great detail on adjusting the batting average for positional bias, which I won’t get into at this time, but I encourage you to review his math and reasoning behind it. Basically once he did the math, he determined that the differential in average would only be around two percentage points, rather than the seven we saw from 2000 -2007.

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