Every Friend Who Mattered Threw Left-Handed

I said something out loud recently that I had never actually put together, and it stopped me.

Every one of them was a lefty.

Not most. Not a funny majority. The four men who held up four load-bearing sections of my baseball life all threw with the same hand I do, and I had gone thirty years without noticing.

The four

Michael Keyes: the comeback. 2006, seven months out of a hip replacement, no team and no coach. He lived twenty-five minutes away and drove over to throw whenever I wanted, for months, for nothing.

Danny Borne: the rookie year. 2007, Windy City, the other left-hander in the bullpen. He taught me how to carry myself as a professional, in what turned out to be the last season of his own career.

Graham Campbell: Victoria, 2009. Not just a friend I made that summer; he was my actual host family, the people whose house I lived in, and he was also my teammate on the mound. He went 1-1 with a 7.36 ERA that year, threw 47.2 innings out of the bullpen, struck out 42. We don't talk much these days. I still love him like family, because for one season he was.

Chris Salamida: Winnipeg, 2011. Another lefty starter in the same rotation, a real pro who spent five years with the Goldeyes and still holds a piece of that franchise's strikeout record. An awesome teammate, and still a good friend today.

Four hinges. Four lefties.

Why it is probably not a coincidence

About ten percent of people are left-handed. Roughly a third of a pitching staff is.

That gap is the whole thing. Left-handers are dramatically over-represented in the one room I spent my twenties in, which means the pool of people I could become close to was already tilted before anyone made a choice. Play on eleven teams in five countries and the odds catch up with you.

But it is not only arithmetic, and I think anyone who has been in a bullpen knows it.

A left-handed pitcher is a different job with the same name. You are scouted differently: the bar for velocity is lower and everyone knows it and says so out loud, usually in front of you. You are coached differently, because half the instruction is written for the other guy and someone has to translate it. You get released differently, and you also get one more chance than you deserve, because there is always a manager somewhere who needs a lefty on a Tuesday.

You spend your career being told you are useful for a reason that has nothing to do with how hard you worked. That does something to a person. And when you meet somebody else it has happened to, you do not need to explain any of it.

The other thing

There is a version of this where I make it about arms and mechanics and being a mirror image of everyone else, and that version is fine but it is not what I actually think.

I think we found each other because we were all slightly outside the middle of the room.

That is what a lefty is in a baseball clubhouse. Useful, wanted, undeniably part of it, and structurally a bit off-centre. The drills are not built for you. The scouting language is not built for you. You are the specialist, which is a compliment and a boundary at the same time.

I had a destroyed hip on top of it, and later a replaced one, which put me further outside the middle of the room than the handedness ever did. So maybe I was drawn to the other people standing slightly off to the side, and it turned out they were mostly holding gloves on the wrong hand.

What I would tell a kid

I coach a lot of left-handed kids now. Their parents almost always bring it up in the first five minutes, and always as an advantage: he's a lefty, that's worth something, right?

It is. It genuinely is, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But the thing I actually want to tell them is the part nobody says: you are going to be a little bit apart, and that is not a problem to fix. Find the other ones. They will understand what you are dealing with faster than any coach will, and in my experience they will still be there twenty years later when the baseball part is long over.

Mine drove twenty-five minutes to throw with me. Taught me how to be a pro while his own career was ending. Took me into his own home for a season and pitched alongside me while he did it. Held a rotation spot next to mine three thousand miles from where it all started.

I am not sure any of that is about throwing left-handed. But it is a hell of a pattern.