The last few days watching the KC Royals feed on Extra Innings has been pretty brutal. While you have to feel for guys who watch the Royals play 162 meaningless games year after year, having to listen to Herm Edwards talk about football for two innings is a bit infuriating. Would it kill MLB to let us choose which feed we get to see? Anyway, for some reason the Royals felt the need to mark the
Twenty-fourth anniversary of
The Pine Tar Game by giving away
powder-blue Royals t-shirts with "pine tar" stains all over them. First of all- ugly. Second of all- 24 years? Huh? Third of all- the Royals ended up winning the game! Get over it!
So anyway, they showed some clips from the continuation of the "suspended game" in which Billy Martin staged sort of a protest by running out Ron Guidry into CF to finish the game, and a young Don Mattingly at second base. The announcers noted that it was weird seeing a left-handed thrower play second base. Baseball-reference.com says that Mattingly didn't get a chance to make any plays at second in that half-inning, but I would imagine it is pretty weird. Imagine a left-handed second baseman making a play on a grounder up the middle. He would then have to stop, turn counter-clockwise 270 degrees, and throw to first off their back foot (with their backs to the rest of the infield). There's a reason there haven't been many left-handed second basemen. I wanted to find out exactly how few there were.
Thanks to B-R.com's Play Index, we can see that, since 1957,
there have only been six major league games played with a left-handed second baseman. Mattingly shows up, even though he only played one half-inning. There's also Gonzalo Marquez, who played two games at 2B for the Athletics in 1973. Here's the
first game, in which Marquez reached on an error in the top of the first and then A's manager Dick Williams replaced him for the bottom of the first inning, so Marquez never saw the field.
The next day, Williams did the same thing, using
four different players at 2B in the game. So Marquez never fielded a ball at second either.
The next entry is
Thad Bosley, an OF/DH for the Royals (among other teams) in the 1980s. A left-handed thrower, Bosley pinch-hit for the starting second baseman (Buddy Biancalana) in the
bottom of the eighth inning. He then stayed on and played the top of the ninth and did not see a play at second base, and was later replaced for a pinch hitter in the bottom of the ninth.
The oldest case listed is
George Crowe, a first-baseman with the Cincinnati Reds who,
in a 1958 game, was briefly switched with second-baseman Johnny Temple for one play. Following a single by Bobby Thomson (yes, of shot-heard-round-the-world fame), the two switched positions for a play cryptically described as a "Double Play: Pop-fly, 1B to 2B." What happened here? Was there some kind of trickery going on? The two men switched back after the play and Crowe never played second base for the rest of his career. Since there are no reliable box scores prior to 1957, we do not know if this sort of thing happened a lot.
Finally, the strangest case of all, that of
Sam McDowell, left-handed
pitcher. On July 6, 1970, McDowell was pitching for the Indians in the eighth inning of a game agains the Senators with a 6-4 lead. To that point McDowell had scattered 11 hits in 7.2 innings striking out 12 while allowing the four runs. With runners on second and third and two out, Cleveland manager Alvin Dark called to the bullpen for a righty, Dean Chance. Powerful righty Frank Howard was up next, followed by righty cleanup hitter Rick Reichardt. But Dark didn't send McDowell off the field; instead, he sent off third baseman Greg Nettles and told McDowell to go play second base. Chance then intentionally walked Howard to load the bases, then induced a groundball to third from Reichardt. Eddie Lemon, who had been playing second base, fielded the ball and threw to McDowell at 2nd for the force to end the inning. McDowell would then re-take the mound for the ninth, striking out the side to end the game. I'm not sure it's officially in the rules somewhere, but I suppose one cannot be charged with both a Win and a Save in the same game...
Suffice it to say, all six occurances have weird circumstances. Further, it is extremely interesting to us at Immaculate Inning that of the hundreds of thousands of putouts registered in Major League Baseball since 1957, only two have been registered by left-handed second basemen. Compare this to the
dearth of left-handed catchers. Since 1957, only four
left-handed catcher's mitts have been worn in nine different major league baseball games. Journeyman 1B/OF Benny Distefano is the latest, catching three games for the Pirates in 1989. Diminuitive first baseman Mike Squires caught two games for the White Sox in 1980, registering just one putout. Similarly, Dale Long was used for two games at catcher in 1958.
The theory as to why there are very few left-handed catchers
is harder to grasp. There used to be a lot more of them in the early days of the game. One theory is that it is almost impossible for a lefty to make a snap throw to third base on a steal attempt- but isn't it just as hard for righties to make similar throws behind the runner at first? A better theory is that catchers typically are the second-best throwing players on your average little league team. If those guys were left-handed, it is likely that they would be groomed as pitchers, and would play 1B or OF when not pitching. For the most part, this one seems a lot more like tradition and is not hampered by practical problems.
Xenod would like to add that he plans on having a left-handed son and that he will grow up to be the first full-time left-handed catcher in the history of baseball. Good luck to him on that quest.
