Leo Morgenstern

I'm doing great.

Glad to be back.

I mean, part of the reason I wanted to write about Savalle was just he had this history of being a...

Yeah, well, so the thing I first noticed that made me want to write the piece was that left-handed hitters were taking a higher percentage of plate appearances than in any season since at least I started watching baseball.

On Fangraphs, we have splits leaderboards that help us split up plate appearances by whether you took them from the right-hand side or the left-hand side.

Those go back to 2002.

Since 2002, it's never been anywhere this close to having an even split of batters, batter from the right-hand side and batter from the left-hand side.

And then what made me go from there to realizing that this was, quote-unquote, the year of the left-handed hitter was that

Left-handed hitters are also hitting really well compared to right-handed hitters, which means if you look at the numbers we have at Fangraphs that help us quantify total value provided by different hitters, that left-handed hitters have actually provided more value to their teams than right-handed hitters this year for the first time that we have any record of.

Yeah, well, I think that there's definitely some randomness going on and there could be a mixture of factors leading to it.

But my theory in the article, and I can get into more of why that is, and you can see more of why that is in the article, is that in 2025, left-handed pitchers had this incredible season.

It was...

arguably the year of the left-handed pitcher, and they were dominating specifically right-handed opponents in a way that we hadn't seen maybe ever.

And I think that now we're seeing more left-handed hitters come up to the plate because of the way that right-handed batters were struggling against left-handed pitchers in 2025.

Yeah, well, I mean, you can think of it like all else being equal, if a manager has to pick his batter without knowing the pitcher who's going to be on the mound, you're a lot more likely to have the platoon advantage if you pick a left-handed hitter because there are a lot more right-handed pitchers.

And...

So in order for right-handed hitters to have value, to be worth taking up a spot in a lineup, they have to really give left-handed pitchers hell because they're going to have the platoon advantage so much less often.

I mean, maybe they can see a microcosm of this on the Blue Jays with the decision to send down David Schneider that like...

When a guy is just a weak half of a platoon, a right-handed hitter who is supposed to be your guy against left-handed pitchers, he has to really mash against those left-handed pitchers to make up for all of the times he's not going to have the platoon advantage against right-handed pitchers.

And I think we're sort of seeing, because right-handed hitters aren't having that advantage against left-handed pitchers as much anymore, we're seeing managers shift more towards, well, the more lefties I have, the more likely I am to have the platoon advantage overall.