The Chris Moeller Archives

Vendetta against Venditte

Pat Venditte became the second ambidextrous pitcher in 120 years of Major League Baseball yesterday when he was called up by Oakland after eight seasons in the minor leagues. As he demonstrated in his first game at Boston's Fenway Park, he's capable of switching from left arm to right, and back again, in the same inning. (Some of us don't have even one big-league-caliber arm.) Venditte's first test was successful. He threw two shut-out innings in relief. If things continue to go well, the Athletics should be able to use him to eat up a ton of innings this summer. I'm going to assume they're wise enough to keep two different pitch counts.

Is Major League Baseball ready, though? There have always been a number of switch-hitters in the game, and so now, let the chess game begin. Pitch by pitch, the switch-batsmen are allowed to change sides of the dish, although it's extremely rare that they do. They stick, instead, to the conventional wisdom in the game, which is that left-handed hitters do better at the bat against right-handed throwers, and right-handers better against the southpaws. (No Major League pitcher yet has literally had a paw.) But this is not universal. I do recall that switch-hitting Hall-of-Famer Ozzie Smith went up to bat swinging right-handed against a right-hander at least one time in his career with the Cardinals. That leads me to wonder whether his official career statistics are fully accurate or if somebody might have gotten lazy at some point. For switch-hitters, we get accustomed to thinking "versus RH pitcher" and "batting left" would be the same thing, but in Ozzie's case, the statistics would be slightly different. I tried to look it up tonight on Ozzie's page at www.baseball-reference.com to see if that was true, but I started drowning in a sea of Ratio Batting and Win Probabilities and gave up.

But I digress. My concern for Venditte's cause stems from one of the highlights I saw on Sportscenter from last night's game. When switch-hitting catcher Black Swihart came to the plate for Boston in Venditte's second inning of work, the pitcher had to declare which arm he was going to use for that plate appearance. This was ordered by the home plate umpire to be consistent with a long-standing MLB rule that has almost never applied to an actual game situation. But that rule needs to change now. A pitcher should be able to throw it up there any way he wants, provided he starts with one foot on the rubber and respects the guidelines for avoiding a balk when there are runners on base and doesn't use steroids or bet on the games. Joaquin Andujar was an over-the-top right-handed pitcher, but sometimes with two strikes on the batter, he would drop his delivery down sidearm. He didn't have to tell the batter that he was going to do it. The element of surprise was the point. You can throw it underhand if you want to-- maybe to the Phillies' lineup this year to help make things fairer. Pitchers try to trick hitters. That's the tradition of the game. It's why some pitches-- maybe you've heard this-- are not thrown straight. The hitter's job is to try to adjust. Just like in football, where it's the quarterback's job to decide how much air is in the football, and then the defense adjusts.

It's time for the new MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, to step up and be a Manfred. Retired lefty Al Hrabosky often says that baseball hasn't passed a rule that benefited the pitchers since before the time the mound was lowered in 1969. Here's a small corner of the game where that string could be broken. Or maybe I'm taking this whole thing too seriously.

posted by CM @ 8:47 PM