Matt Trueblood

Last year, the Red Sox's two biggest stars were left-handed batters who were unholy terrors against right-handed pitchers. Against lefties, though, they were fairly easy outs. But you knew that. What you really want to know is: Why? For as long as there has been professional baseball, there has been a patterned and almost immutable platoon advantage—favoring batters against opposite-handed pitchers and pitchers when they face same-handed batters. Yet, for just as long, there have been managers and team presidents and rabid fans and data wizards trying to figure out whether certain players show an enduring platoon skill. They wanted to know whether some players could persistently perform differently, based on the handedness of the opposing batter or pitcher, than a broad application of the standard advantage could predict. Platoon Splits, MLB, 2024 Platoon Splits Table Split PA H 2B 3B HR BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS BAbip tOPS+ sOPS+ vs RHP as RHB 69757 15210 2916 210 2009 4952 16106 .241 .303 .389 .691 .290 95 100 vs RHP as LHB 63596 13812 2735 314 2034 5954 14002 .245 .321 .412 .734 .289 106 100 vs LHP as RHB 35144 7818 1606 108 1082 3006 7735 .249 .318 .410 .728 .294 105 100 vs LHP as LHB 13952 2983 514 65 328 1017 3354 .237 .302 .366 .668 .295 89 100 Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 3/30/2025. In fact, the existence of that kind of hitter (and, even more certainly, that kind of pitcher) has never been in doubt. You can't watch baseball closely for very long without coming to the conclusion that some batters handle same-handed pitchers better than others—and better than they themselves might be expected to handle them, given how they hit when they enjoy the advantage. Others are specialists who crush opposite-handed pitchers but can't do much against same-handed ones. Occasionally, there are even players who are genuinely better in matchups where they lack the standard or traditional platoon advantage. Most of these are pitchers, who can specialize in changeups or have an especially vertical fastball-curveball pairing that interacts well with their delivery, but journeyman infielder Kelly Johnson and Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki were each left-handed batters who had better career OPSes against lefty hurlers. For the most part, though, it's been tough to articulate why platoon skills exist for particular players, which has induced a natural skepticism of them. Even now, most teams run fairly programmed platoons, when they do that sort of thing. If they believe a given right-handed batter can be better against righty pitchers than against southpaws, or better than a lefty batter of similar overall ability against those righties, they do a very good job of hiding it. Sample size has always been a major problem here. Estimating a player's true talent level is difficult even when dealing with the relatively robust sample of their full performance record. Start slicing and dicing and trying to extrapolate from the subsets, the thinking goes, and you're asking to be fooled. You're going ghost-hunting, and all you'll find is what you convince yourself is there. The seminal text on modern statistical questions in baseball is still, arguably, The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, published in 2007 by a trio of authors that included Tom M. Tango—the pseudonym of the man who now helps run Baseball Savant and rolls out new datasets to baseball fans on a regular basis. In The Book, individualized platoon skills receive cold suspicion, and the tone set in that tome has remained the prevailing one ever since. In the nearly 20 years since then, though, we've learned a ton about how both hitting and pitching work. We don't have to wait for the noise to leech out of a sample of performance in a given split. As of this spring, we have access not only to bat speed and swing length data, but to some of where batters set up in the batter's box and (more importantly) where their swing tends to intercept the ball, relative to their body and to home plate. Once we're pinning down the place where a hitter is trying to make contact with the ball, we gain a much greater understanding of how their skill set interacts with the opposing pitcher. As it turns out, while many hitters want to hit the ball more or less the same way regardless of handedness, there are exceptions to that rule, and they can be extremely telling. In 2024, Rafael Devers batted .272/.354/.516. It was arguably the best year of his career to date. (For a moment, set aside his struggles to start this season. They're not immediately germane for us.) Within it, though, existed two disparate versions of the slugger. He batted 377 times against right-handed pitchers, and hit .293/.385/601 against them, with 24 home runs. Against lefties, in 224 trips to the plate, he hit a meager .240/.304/.382 and managed just four long balls. Teams who could force him to face a steady diet of lefties could contain the otherwise lethal Devers most of the time. Jarren Duran had an equally dazzling season, although without as much of a track record to support it. He batted .285/.342/.492, cracked 83 total extra-base hits and led the American League in both doubles and triples. Virtually all of his power came against right-handed hurlers, though. He bludgeoned them to the tune of .298/.353/.557, but against lefties, he hit just .255/.319/.346 in 230 plate appearances. The list of hitters anywhere in baseball with platoon splits as extreme as those of both Devers and Duran is very short. Are those a mere statistical quirk—or can we now see why they're so extreme, and have more confidence in the staying power of those sp;ots? Here's a list of the left-handed batters who had the biggest gap between their average contact points against right-handed and left-handed pitchers, in favor of a deeper contact point against southpaws. These numbers are in inches from the front of home plate. Positive numbers mean the contact point was in front of the plate. Player Contact Pt. v RHP Contact Pt. v. LHP Contact Pt. Split Rafael Devers 8.6 2.7 5.9 Pete Crow-Armstrong 5.3 -0.1 5.4 Joc Pederson -0.9 -4.2 3.3 Jarren Duran 0.8 -2.4 3.2 Jake Fraley 1.7 -1.4 3.1 That the Sox's two star lefty batters rank among the five lefties whose contact point gets the farthest forward against righty hurlers is awfully suggestive. That they sit there next to Joc Pederson (.174 OPS split in 2024; .214 for his career) and Jake Fraley (.179, .277, respectively) seems to scream a particular conclusion at us. It's not necessarily the case that hitters should try to keep an equivalent contact rate against both lefties and righties, or that any two hitters should be aiming for the same contact point against any particular type of pitcher. What does seem safe to say is that both Devers and Duran have established singularly effective average contact rates against right-handed pitchers, given their swings and their contact skills. If you start from that premise, it's no surprise that a large difference between that figure and the corresponding one against lefties would be bad news for each. Other questions abound here. Are all contact point splits created equal, or does a different principle help us predict platoon skills among right-handed batters? Does it matter where you start relative to the plate, or where your contact point starts in the reference case? How does a verifiable contact point split interact with other split data teams use to make decisions about deploying players? For today, I don't want to attempt to answer all of those. It's enough, I think, to start by saying this: Some batters do have significant differences in their contact (or intercept) point based on the handedness of the opposing pitcher. That data could help us better understand what types of pitchers a batter will and won't match up well against. The Red Sox might not be anxious to take either Devers or Duran out of their lineup, even against left-handed pitchers. With these data on them, though, we can say a few things with greater confidence. Firstly. they'd need to make a major (and fairly difficult) adjustment to their approach to close their wider-than-average platoon gaps. Second, those platoon splits are probably real, to an extent we couldn't have previously been sure of. Understanding all that, the team might be well served by turning to Rob Refsnyder more often than you'd think, even if it means benching one of their All-Stars. This underscores the value and importance of bringing in Alex Bregman, of course. The key question it invites without answering, though, is what kind of contact point split might make a hitter especially good against same-handed pitchers, rather than especially vulnerable to them. For that, we'll have to plunge deeper into the weeds, another time. View full article