Opposite Hand Advantage and the Overrepresentation of Left..Handed Players in Major League Baseball

Headnote

Keywords: Opposite hand advantage, Fixed effect model, Game theory, Nash equilibrium

JEL classification: J24, L83, Z22

ABSTRACT

It is generally believed that batters have an advantage when facing opposite-handed pitchers. While this opposite hand advantage is known to be ex ante, the performance of players is ex post, which contains information about their skill, hand (dis)advantage, and teams' recruiting strategies. Based on more than 1.3 million play-by-play data points in Major League Baseball from 2000 to 2012, we provide a quantitative estimate of the opposite hand advantage to show how it can be used as a determinant of the excess supply of left-handed players. The results indicate the opposite hand advantage accounts for about 7-15% of the ex post on-base plus slugging. Second, compared to average batters, marginal batters, both right-handed and left-handed, are more affected by the proportion of left-handed pitchers. Third, in terms of strategic advantage, 7.5% more left-handed batters should be employed in Major League.

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1. INTRODUCTION

In baseball, batters are generally assumed to perform better when facing pitchers of the opposite handedness. This prevailing belief is considered too self-evident to be disputed; as Casey Stegnel put it, "There is not much to it. You put a right-hand hitters against a left-hand pitcher and a left-hand hitter against a right-hand pitcher." (Albert and Bennett, 2003, p. 87). In baseball history, one of the oft-cited cases of opposite hand (OH) advantage is the miracle produced by the Boston Braves in 1914 when the team worked its way up from being at the bottom of the league standings and, with the help of left-right platoon arrangements, eventually won the World Series (Nowlin, 2014).

In order to exploit the OH advantage, left-handed pitchers and batters are more sought after in Major League Baseball (MLB), as encapsulated in the title of a 2014 article in Baseball America: "The Quest to Gain Platoon Advantage Takes a Left Turn" (Eddy, 2014). In view of this left-right platoon advantage, how many left-handed pitchers and batters can be allocated per team? What is the optimal proportion of left-handed players in MLB?

According to most estimates, approximately 10% of the world population is left-handed (e.g. Raymond et...