Matt Gelb

And so being able to use all this information and all this data that we have, and over the past several years, learn how to communicate those notions in ways that most everyone can understand, as you might imagine, is something that I take great pride in.

Yeah, I'm eminently fascinated by this, and my prediction is that between now and, well, the next time you and I talk, any number of people will write articles that rhyme with this online because, like most things, once someone taps into a notion like this that's pronounced in this case, everyone's going to want to figure out why and the way that it applies to my team specifically or my favorite player specifically.

In a nutshell, left-handed hitters are outperforming righties to their largest extent in any year since 1946, and the league has caught on.

Teams are stacking their lineups accordingly.

Right now, lefties are in line for 41% of plate appearances league-wide, which would be the highest in a season since 1900.

So lefties are hitting better than certainly anyone practically living and are hitting more than, quite literally.

And the answer to why that's the case, look, it's probably a multifactorial answer, but the most straightforward one that I've been able to find is that the plate is smaller.

That was obviously a, you know, sort of an unintended consequence of the ABS and the standardized strike zone.

But what we have found most specifically is that the pitch that was most over-called, for lack of a better term, was the pitch off the outside corner to left-handed hitters based upon, look, where the umpire set up.

Their blind spot, for lack of a better term, was that very pitch.

And because most umpires are right-handed, as most of us are, they're more equipped or more naturally able to call that pitch inside to a righty than they are outside to a lefty.

So all this to say, it's my opinion that teams probably knew this in their modeling a year or two or even three ago and have sort of adjusted accordingly.

But some of the best hitters in baseball, if you look at the top of the OPS leaderboard, the WRC Plus leaderboard, most all of them

are left-handed.

And I'm going to go through at some point and figure out to what extent that has carried historically.

But long story short, lefties are banging.

Lefties are representing their lineup more than any season in the last 125 plus years.

Teams have certainly noticed.

And the biggest reason why I can find is that that inch on the sort of off the black when the left-hander is in the batter's box off to the outside corner, that's not getting called for the first time probably in baseball history.

Yeah, we have more than enough data, not to overreact, but to at least jump to some conclusions.