A month or so ago, I observed here that I didn’t see how left-handed-throwing first basemen had any appreciable advantage over their right-handed counterparts. This was partly out of contrariness on my part—people alla time speaking of the advantage that lefties have in fielding first-base, yet never providing any real evidence for it, to which I asked, "OK, where’s the beef?"

If you’ve got evidence, I want to look at what you got, and subject it to the usual prodding and poking to see if it holds up. "Evidence" is more than "A lot of folks say it’s true" or "I’ve always heard it’s true" or (my favorite) "It’s obviously true, or else people wouldn’t say it all the time, for years and years and years. What, are you smarter than a couple of hundred years’ worth of received wisdom, or something? Huh, are you, Mister Smartypants? Huh? Are you, huh?"

Problem was, I didn’t have a good test to deal with the question, "Do lefties have advantages in fielding first base?" and without a good test, all I got was an irritating argument with someone who felt, well, honestly, the only thing I can safely say he felt was that he was right and I was wrong about lefties’ advantage in fielding at first base. I didn’t think the "Comments" section was worth reading after a while (actually, I felt it broke the record for "Most tedious Comments section in BJOL history," and that’s saying a lot) so I just gave up. (Masochists’ alert: https://www.billjamesonline.com/margaret_are_you_grieving/?pg=2 .)

But, purely by chance, I was reading some of the earliest "Hey Bill"s, as is my wont (someone suggested that Bill collect them as a book, a fabulous idea) and I was surprised that the question had arisen almost ten years ago:

Have you researched the issue of whether or not left handed first basemen have a quantifiable advantage over right handed first basemen? If there is such an advantage, I would think that it would show up in the number of assists, and possibly in the number of putouts made on pickoffs by the pitcher.

Asked by: evan

Equally surprising was that Bill didn’t have a ready answer to this query. Or rather that he did, but didn’t have any data to support his answer:

Answered: 9/2/2009

Well, we know they have AN advantage.   It's a question of whether it is a statsitically meaningful advantage.   I haven't studied it, but one of the places it should show up is in 3-6-3 and 3-6-1 double plays.    Anyway got any data?

2009 was a while ago, and Baseball-Reference, as it happens, now does provide data for 3-6-3 and 3-6-1 doubleplays, and they even throw in 3-6 DPs into the bargain. To paraphrase Bill elsewhere, these are all skill plays: any time a first baseman starts a groundball  DP, whether it has him catching a grounder, throwing to second base, and returning to the bag to finish it up (3-6-3), or not (3-6-1), or has him running to the 1B bag to nab the batter and then firing to 2B to catch the runner,  it requires real ability. You won’t find any old heavy-legged weak-armed 1B men, righties OR lefties, starting a lot of DPs, and it’s exactly the play that "people" say a lefty 1B-man excels at, because it is more awkward for a righty to catch a grounder and then shift his body clockwise to get in a good position to fire the ball down to 2B. (A lefty catching a grounder is already pretty much in throwing position, to belabor the obvious.) So now we have some data. Whoopee! What shall we do with it?

I know, kids! Let’s make a table!

In fact, it’s a beautiful day, let’s make two! A table of right-handed fielding first baseman, and another table of left-handed fielding first basemen, and let’s compare the two.  I began by finding all the first basemen in 2018 who were playing the position for at least 4000 opponents’ Plate Appearances. There were 17 such fielders last season, 12 righties and 5 lefties.

Before we get started, and I hope without starting up that incredibly tedious conversation from last month (Please, Lord, I don’t ask for much), I need to observe that I found it mildly surprising yet seriously supportive of my position on the matter that there were so many more righties than lefties. My position on the matter was that orientation doesn’t matter—if it was so all-blasted important to get a lefty at 1B, managers would just find some lefty, even one who didn’t hit so well, or one who could play the outfield, or one who was twiddling his thumbs in AAA ball, and stick him at first base, no matter what, but no. Managers seemed to employ righties pretty often at first base, which told me that no one found it particularly helpful to get a lefty at 1B.  Sure, lefties CAN play 1B, just like they CAN play the OF, but playing the OF demands extra skills—a strong throwing arm, or speed, or ability to track flies while running full-out—that 1B doesn’t demand, so what a 1B-man is is an outfielder without those particular skills, or maybe one with the ability to field hard-hit grounders, just as a DH is someone with none of those particular skills.

Digression on the spectrum of fielders: We’ve already discussed to death the reasons that a 2B man, 3B man, shortstop or catcher CAN’T be left-handed, so my argument boils down to "You can play 1B if all you can do is catch a grounder, while every other defensive position demands the ability to throw, or run, or perform some other skillful defensive maneuvers. Just catching grounders won’t make you a great defensive first baseman, but people have made long careers with that single skill." I’ve never thought about it in just this way before, but four out of the five positions at the right end of the defensive spectrum allow lefties, while the three leftmost defensive positions don’t. In fact, if you just switch around CF and 3B, you get a perfect breakdown of positionality and handedness, so the moral is: if you insist on batting righthanded, you’d better be able to field really well.

The defensive spectrum-- more precisely the fielding spectrum, since pitchers would be at the far left end of the defensive spectrum, despite their not having unusually strong fielding skills—runs as follows, if you’re late to the game:

C-SS-2B-CF-3B-RF-LF-1B.

Catcher is also a bit of an outlier, if you use the fielding spectrum to measure positions that are increasingly more transferable left-to-right and less transferable right-to-left.  Craig Biggio aside, you don’t see many catchers being moved to CF as they get older. But otherwise, the spectrum Bill devised in the late 70s, early 80s, does measure a rough decline in fielding abilities—shortstops can play most any position to the right, while few rightfielders can become centerfielders or second-basemen as they age. A second-baseman who loses some of his range can play 3B, usually, while a third baseman rarely becomes a second baseman late in his career. I can’t think of any established third-baseman, off the top of my head, who did make second base his regular position. Anyone?

While we’re refreshing our thoughts on the fielding spectrum (one particularly astute reader confessed in Reader Posts last month that he couldn’t keep straight whether the spectrum grew more demanding left-to-right or right-to-left), I’ll share a few thoughts about it that may go beyond Bill’s original concept. I ran this idea past Bill recently, and he seemed to give it his general approval: there are particular skills that fielders have to play the infield and the outfield that determine one’s position. For the outfield in general, the basic requirement is that you be able to track and catch a fly ball. If you can do that, and do it at top speed, you can play centerfield. (If you have mediocre tracking and/or catching skills, and you’re speedy, then you’re either a bad centerfielder or a fast leftfielder.)  If you can do that and throw very accurately and very far, you can play right field. If you can only do that, you’re a leftfielder. If you can’t do any of that, you must play in the infield.

For an infielder, the basic requirement is that you be able to field a groundball. If you can do that, and have a strong throwing arm, you can play third. If you can field a groundball and cover a good amount of range, you can play second, and if you can both cover a good amount of range and have a strong throwing arm, voila, you’re a shortstop. If all you can do is field a groundball, then you play first, and if you can’t field a groundball or track or catch a flyball, then what the hell are you doing on the field? You’re a DH.

Now it’s possible, even probable, that a team has two men with the abilities of a shortstop, which is why we have backup shortstops, but if they can both hit well enough to start, then that team has a shortstop and also a second baseman with a good throwing arm. In other words, there’s no rule that you must have a weak throwing arm to play second base—these are minimum requirements. And I’m not taking offensive needs into account, of course—sometimes a team will need to play someone at a position that demands defensive skills that player lacks, which is where all the fielders we love to mock come from.  But sometimes that trade-off is the team’s best option, at least until it convinces itself empirically that all the practice and experience on earth will not make a third baseman out of Bobby Bonilla.

Speaking of which, I remember that when the Mets first acquired Keith Hernandez, their regular first baseman was Dave Kingman, sort of going from the ridiculous to the sublime, and one of their first conundra was what to do with Kingman. "Take him behind the barn and shoot him" wasn’t really an option because Kingman was one of their very few decent batters at the time, so I thought, "Play him at first base, and play Hernandez at third," until one of my friends who had watched Hernandez closely pointed out to me that Hernandez was left-handed. What difference? I thought, having watched Mets’ teams with third basemen who seemed to field the position without any hands at all, but I conceded the point. Hernandez got to play first base, and Kingman was soon on his way to Wrigley, which was better for his life expectancy than being taken behind the barn and shot.

Back to 2018, and our tables of first basemen, if there were actually a good reason that lefties had a huge advantage over righties in playing first base, wouldn’t we see most 1B men wearing their gloves on their right hand? In fact, we still see most first basemen throwing with their right hand, despite the fact that righties can play any position while lefties are limited to playing only 1B and the three OF spots.  It’s not that lefties have a special skill that suits them for first base, but rather it’s that they need limited skills to play the position adequately: if you’re left-handed and you’re not fast, can’t judge a fly well or run fast or throw the ball particularly well, we still have a position you can play. Last year, it looks like one first baseman in three was lefthanded.

Or that’s what the small sample shows. I’d love it if someone wants to expand this small sample: maybe you want to sort all the first basemen in 2018 according to their orientation (dexterity/sinistrality, not sexual) and learn how all of them, not just these 17, compare to each other. Or maybe you want to do 2017, and 2016, and 2015, going all the way back to Tim Harkness and Frank Chance. (Tim and Chance happeneth to us all, but I’m going to stick to 2018 anyway.)

If you do want to expand this 2018 list a bit, however, I suggest that, like me, you set your cutoffs at arbitrary thousand-PA intervals. My arbitrary point was 4000 opposing Plate Appearances, just to establish that I wasn’t cutting the list off at a point that favored my argument. (In fact, the final name on my list was a lefthanded Gold Glover who just happened to be playing first base during 4003 plate Appearances—I figured no one could have a problem with my cutting the list off right after a lefthanded Gold Glover appeared on it.) If you want to add guys who played first base for 3000-3999 PAs, there are only five more, and if you want to add 2000-2999, there are eleven more. There were exactly 200 guys who played first base in MLB in 2018, so if you want to include them all, including the four who didn’t have a single fielding chance at first, knock yourself out. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2018-specialpos_1b-fielding.shtml

It dudn’t matter, because I think this sample of 17 shows that there’s no difference between righties and lefties, at least as far starting DPs went in 2018:

Basically, these two groups in 2018 had about as close a DP rate as you could get. (Groucho to Margaret Dumont imploring him to dance closer to her: "If I was any closer, I’d be in back of you!")  In terms of batting average, we’d be talking about the difference between a .331135 average and a .331136, which is to say no meaningful difference at all. In fact, I wonder if it ever happened that a batting title had to be settled around the sixth position to the right of the decimal point, wouldn’t we just say, "Hell with it, it’s a tie." I’d sure be plenty pissed-off to be the runner-up in that situation, tell you that.

Put another way, the other way around, one group turned a skill-DP once every 741 plate appearances and the other group turned the trick once every 733 PAs. Would you ever base any sort of personnel decision on a difference that tiny? The tiny difference (between 0.001349 and 0.001365 doubleplays per plate appearance) favors the righties, but a difference that small is really no difference at all.

If you’re a careful reader of charts, you will have noticed that there is a statistical anomaly in the two charts above: the total number of DPs that go 3-6, where the first baseman fields the ball, steps on first to get the batter first and then throws to second base to nab the runner on a tag play, is "11" on both charts, despite the many fewer PA for lefty-fielding first basemen. Is this the key? Is this play the one that lefties can perform much better than righties? Perhaps, though it is the one type of DP that Bill did NOT nominate as a likely place to look at the problem. ("…one of the places it should show up is in 3-6-3 and 3-6-1 double plays.") If you’ll recall, I added it to the chart, simply because the data was right there, and it seemed to require as much skill as either of the others. If someone wants to argue that THIS is the one true skill play, the fiendishly difficult DP that separates the wheat from the cream, the goats from the chaff, the milk from the sheep, among first basemen, I’m all ears, though you’ll need to explain why 1) Bill didn’t think of it, 2) it would be true and, most important, 3) why the other two types of DPs that Bill thought so demanding of skill now are much more frequent, when considered alone, for right-handed first basemen.

Now, it’s possible that there are other plays that lefties can perform better at than righties, but I’ll be damned if I can think of them. Pickoff plays, maybe? Throws to 3B? I can’t really imagine plays that occur very often where handedness would, even theoretically, make a difference, and these were the plays that Bill, nine years ago, came up with as his best test. If you have any suggestions for a different test, or an improvement in mine, or different data to use in fleshing out this little study, I’ll be very interested to see what you come up with.