I was watching the playoffs the other day and I noticed that Rickey Henderson bats right-handed and throws left-handed.
Gee, I thought, there sure aren't too many players with that combination. I wonder how many I can think of.
Let's see now ... there's Rickey Henderson, and ...
Um...
All right, I said, I'll go to the books. Surely there are more bats-right-throws-left players than Rickey Henderson in the majors today.
I was right. There are more. Three more, to be exact.
In the 2000 season, there were only four non-pitchers who bat right and throw left: Henderson, White Sox outfielder Jeff Abbott, Phillies first baseman Brian Hunter, and Seattle first baseman Brian Lesher, who only batted five times. That's it.
I didn't realize that this combination was so rare, but it makes sense when you think about it. Most people bat right and throw right, like my father, my three brothers, and I do. I remember that when we played baseball in junior high school, we'd have 40 or 50 kids in a class and maybe two or three, at the most, threw left-handed. Almost no one batted that way.
Some people - not a lot, but some - bat left and throw right, like Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, and my wife Deborah.
There aren't as many of them out there, but lefty throwers (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ken Griffey Jr.) almost always bat left-handed as well. There are very few lefty throwers who bat righty, like Rickey Henderson. You can count the current major leaguers who do so on the fingers of one hand.
I looked through the Internet for some data. It seems that the concept of "handedness", in science, is a much larger issue than merely writing or throwing with one hand or the other. We all have a dominant hand, but we also have a dominant foot, a dominant ear, and a dominant eye. We also chew more on one side of the mouth than the other.
How does this apply to batting? Well, most right-handed people are right-eye dominant and bat right-handed, but if their left eye is dominant, they bat lefty. The dominant eye is more useful behind the other one, closer to the plate, allowing a tiny sliver of a second longer to see the ball. The non-dominant eye, closer to the pitcher, helps track the flight of the ball, while the dominant eye zeroes in on it.
Apparently, then, most people who are right-handed also have dominant right eyes, while some right-handers have dominant left eyes. Most left-handers are lefty all the way, including their eyes, so they bat from the left side of the plate.
However, there aren't many people who are left-handers with dominant right eyes. It's an exceedingly rare combination.
You can see this in looking at players from the past. There are no position players in the Hall of Fame who batted right and threw left. None at all. Some of the prominent men who did so include Cleon Jones of the 1969 Mets, Doug Ault of the expansion Blue Jays of 1977, and old-timers Rube Bressler (1914-32) and Johnny Cooney (1921-45). Hal Chase, a great first baseman involved in betting scandals in the 1910s, batted right and threw left. Jimmy Ryan was another; he hit .309 lifetime from 1885 to 1903.
The only other bats-right-throws-left player that you ever heard of was Eddie Gaedel, the circus midget who batted once for the St. Louis Browns on August 19, 1951.
However, there are several lefty Hall of Fame pitchers who batted righty, including Sandy Koufax, Carl Hubbell, and Eppa Rixey. So did non-Hall members Tommy John and Mickey Lolich. Bressler and Cooney, mentioned above, both started out as pitchers. Several current pitchers, like Randy Johnson, Mike Hampton, and John Rocker, also bat right and throw left.
So, it appears that batting right and throwing left is a rare combination, but most players who fall into this category become pitchers. Why is this?
I think that lefty throwers in general are steered into pitching early on. For one thing, being left-handed excludes you from four of the nine positions on the diamond. A righty can play anywhere, but you can't be a lefty and play short, third, second, or catcher. Also, a lefty pitcher nullifies the great advantage that a lefty batter has over righty pitchers. Left-handers are funneled into pitching because they're most valuable there.
Also, bad hitters often go into pitching, because pitchers don't have to bat as much, and they don't pay too much attention to batting. Koufax, Lolich, and Randy Johnson were terrible hitters. John Rocker is listed as a right-handed batter, but since when does the closer get up to bat? Did Rocker go to the plate at all this season? (Answer - Rocker has pitched in 177 games in the majors and has never gone up to bat.)
Anyway, when Henderson gets elected to the Hall of Fame five years after he retires - and he will - he'll be the first of his kind in Cooperstown. He'll probably be the last as well, unless Jeff Abbott, Brian Hunter, or Brian Lesher are a whole lot better than they've shown so far.