On Glavine and the Left-Handed Advantage

Last night, New York Mets pitcher Tom Glavine became the 23rd pitcher in M.L.B. history to win 300 games. He also became the fifth left-hander to join that elite club. (Glavine obviously has no sense of timing. Couldn't he have timed his win with International Left-Handers Day next Monday? We'll have to leave that for Bonds.)

While the percentage of lefties in the entire population has been put between 9 and 13 percent, that number is higher for elite baseball players. Here is a look at the percentage of lefties who have made it to the three most revered clubs in baseball:

I only included players who both threw and hit left-handed to get a better sense of 'true' lefties. Including those who hit lefty but threw righty would've added three more to the 500 H.R. club and doubled the number in the 3,000 hit club.

One interesting takeaway from the numbers is that the best hitters seem to over represent by the same amount that pitchers do, even though there are more advantages to being a lefty clubber than a southpaw. (The biggest advantage being that it's easier to see the ball when it's thrown at you from the opposite side of the mound.)

Digging a bit deeper, it turns out that a similar percentage (20%) of the close to 14,000 M.L.B. players who debuted between 1900 and 2006 threw left-handed, meaning that lefties are only slightly overrepresented among the best all-time players.

What might be some reasons that there are more lefties in baseball than you'd expect by just extrapolating from the general population? (It becomes more startling when you consider that lefties can't play four out of the nine positions on the field.) Two recent studies provide some clues.

French scientists in 2004 argued that that lefties excel in hand-to-hand combat because their right-handed opponents are not used to fighting them. They documented that in unindustrialized societies, where any violent acts are more likely to occur at close range, the ratio of lefties was much higher in the societies with higher murder rates.

It wouldn't be much of a leap to apply that logic to baseball. While not exactly hand-to-hand combat with the pitcher and hitter standing 60 feet and 6 inches away from each other, its the handedness match up between hitters and hurlers where managers earn their salaries.

Another Frenchman, neuroscientist Guy Azemar, argues that lefties have an advantage because both the processing of visual information and reaction to it happen on the same side of the brain for lefties, meaning they can shave about 20 to 30 milliseconds off in reaction time.

For their part, economists have shown that college-educated male lefties earn 15 percent more than their righty counterparts.

Does this apply in baseball too?

And what about C.E.O.'s? What percentage of the business elite are lefties?

If you have an answer to either of these, drop me a line.

And, full disclosure: I'm left-handed.

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