The evolution of the ambidextrous pitcher

By: Tom Alexander

Many of you have likely seen the very entertaining video of the ambidextrous pitcher against the switch hitter from a recent minor league game. I liked this video a lot, for several reasons, not the least of which is that it’s yet another reminder that you can watch baseball every day for years and years and still see something that you’ve never seen before.

I’d heard of this ambidextrous pitcher, Pat Venditte, back when he was at Creighton, and everything that I’d basically heard was that he was sort of an above-average player, a kind of decent pitcher, who had developed this sort of gimmick thing that he did and that it allowed him to extend his career beyond where it would have gone ordinarily, in large part thanks to his old man. Which is fine, and kind of a decent and compelling story, I guess. Pretty much every one of our fathers tried to help us get as far as we could in baseball, and maybe a bit farther; his dad may have been more creative.

Then I saw him pitching the other day, and it was really interesting to me, because, hijinks aside, I can see this guy making the big leagues.

He’s not a great player, by any stretch. (I don’t think his fastball got up over 90 mph, though he did drop a hammer on that dude to strike him out to end the game, but I digress.) But he does offer something that is pretty unique, which is basically having a free player on your team, in your bullpen. Especially in this day in baseball, when a team will bring in a specialist to face just one batter, or a couple of batters, and end up burning through two pitchers in the course of one inning, the Yankees could conceivably just use this guy and get through an inning. It’s basically like having a 26th man on your roster. Obviously, he’ll have to prove himself to be useful, and there’s a lot of issues surrounding it, but I can definitely see where this would be interesting.

So I thought about it a bit, and I came up with a sort of outlandish sequence of events that you could conceivably see happen.

Around 2010–Ambidextrous pitcher makes the big leagues. Fathers everywhere start to teach their kids to throw in ambidextrous fashion, with the idea being that they’ll be twice as likely to be useful to a baseball team, and thus will have greatly increased chances of making the big leagues.

Around 2025–A bunch of ambidextrous pitchers start to make the major leagues, kids who are about three or four or five right now, who grow up pitching this way. At the same time, players who happen to be switch hitters become heavily in demand, since switch hitting can potentially be one antidote to the ambidextrous pitcher–especially if/when they make the pitcher declare which side he’s going to throw from before the hitter declares (which I think will happen at some point).

Around 2040–You start to see a ton of switch hitters coming into the major leagues–far more than there are now, when it’s probably under 5 percent and definitely a dying breed.

Around 2055–You basically stop seeing ambidextrous pitchers.

Around 2070–The amount of switch hitters basically returns to normal.

I bounced this off my brother, and he summed it up perfectly, I think: “God, I’ll be happy when baseball returns to normal when I’m 83.”

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Tom Alexander founded the Chicago Sports Review in 2003, and currently serves the publication as its co-publisher. Alexander's media career has spanned a variety of interests, including newspaper reporting with the Times of Northwest Indiana, online reporting with ePrairie.com, and a two-plus year stint as a professor in Columbia College Chicago's journalism department. Outside of journalism, Alexander works to redevelop communities that have been struck by natural disasters. Alexander, a 2000 graduate of the University of Chicago, currently lives with his wife Tiffany and their black lab mix, Johnny Cash, in Arlington, Va.

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