A skill with a huge advantage is becoming taboo for young players

CLEVELAND — Francisco Lindor is a natural right-handed batter who desperately wanted to be a switch-hitter as a child so he could be more like his favorite players. His brother and cousin were switch-hitters, as was his favorite player, Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar.

Lindor’s father, Miguel, fought against the idea because Lindor was such a good hitter from the right side. Why make yourself worse by doing something unnatural? It did not make sense.

“That was the way my dad forced me to practice,” Lindor said. “If I did everything right, then I could hit from the left side.”

Now Lindor is part of a dwindling subset of players. Switch-hitters are a dying breed in the major leagues, particularly among Americans.

Of the roughly 550 batters to log a plate appearance through the end of June, only 58 were switch-hitters, according to Stathead. It continues a trend from last season, when MLB’s switch-hitters plummeted to their lowest numbers in 50 years.

Only 26 of those are American-born players, one more than last year, which had the lowest number among Americans in nearly 60 years.

While Latino players are often encouraged to switch-hit as children, it has become almost taboo among young players in the United States. Manager Scott Servais of the Seattle Mariners spent 11 years as a right-handed catcher in the majors. He believes being a switch-hitter is the biggest advantage in sports.

“Youth baseball in our country has changed dramatically over the last 15 years,” Servais said. “The focus ultimately comes down to college scholarships or getting into pro ball, and the lack of patience in letting those things develop in young players. So they get on select teams and they’re traveling all over the country and Mom and Dad are paying a lot of money to put you in front of all the top coaches. Why would we ever put you in a situation where you might fail? And you’re going to fail. Switch-hitting is really hard. It’s really hard when you’re young. And they’re afraid of failure.”

Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh is unsure which side of the plate is his natural side. Raleigh, like the Baltimore Orioles’ Adley Rutschman, is that rare combination of a switch-hitting catcher with power. He has always been right-hand dominant in everyday activities, but from his earliest memories in baseball, he could swing the bat from both sides of the plate because his father made him do it that way.

“Every day I thank the Lord my dad made me a switch-hitter,” Raleigh said. “Because I see some of this nasty stuff that’s being thrown up there.”

The number of switch-hitters in baseball has been declining for the past decade and finally bottomed out last year, when only 63 of more than 650 players logged at-bats from both sides of the plate. That was down from a high of 111 switch-hitters in 1998. American-born switch-hitters peaked at 78 in 1987, according to Stathead.

Carlos Beltrán was a rookie with the Kansas City Royals during baseball’s switch-hitting peak. He played 20 years and hit 438 home runs as one of the best switch-hitters of his era. He began toying with the idea after playing winter ball in Puerto Rico with Bernie Williams, who also switch-hit. Beltrán struggled so much staying back on off-speed pitches and breaking balls that he wanted to give up and go back to hitting solely right-handed. Kevin Long, now the Philadelphia Phillies’ hitting coach, was with Beltrán in the minors and encouraged him to stick with it.

“Thank God for Kevin Long,” Beltrán said. “He said: ‘We are so close. Let’s stay with it. Keep trying.’ I was grateful that I had a coach that believed that what I was doing was the right thing. And he didn’t let me really go back to the right side. I don’t know what my career would have been if I only would have been a right-handed hitter.”

Since Beltrán played, baseball has become more specialized, even at the youth levels, as hitters chase data and cutting-edge metrics. The changes make some of the past greats bristle.

“This generation has lost the ability to hit,” former Cincinnati Reds star Eric Davis said. “You have a lot of guys today who are caught up in exit velocity and launch angle, and they’re not being taught how to hit. They’re not good hitters. So the game is not going to bless them unless you develop a skill to play the game for a long time. And switch-hitting for some guys is an avenue to play the game for a long time.”

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Davis, who hit right-handed during his 17 seasons in the majors, switch-hit early in his career but said he gave it up as a minor leaguer because his coaches told him he did not struggle to hit sliders. The majority of switch-hitters are natural-born righties learning to hit left-handed. The biggest benefit is to hit sliders from right-handed pitchers that break toward the left-handed batter, rather than trying to hit pitches tailing away as a right-hander.

In youth leagues, however, pitchers do not throw breaking pitches until they are teenagers, and most do not develop great movement until closer to high school. It leaves young players struggling to hit from a side of the plate where they are not comfortable and are not having success. And they are doing it to hit breaking pitches that will not actually start breaking drastically until years later.

There is no magic age to begin switch-hitting, but various hitters and coaches polled on the subject believe the right age to start is 9 or 10 to around 13. Beltrán, who started switch-hitting in the minor leagues, is the rare exception. For teenagers who wait until they reach high school, it is often too late.

“If you have problems with sliders, and you want the ball coming toward you rather than going away from you, work on being a switch-hitter,” said Sandy Alomar Jr., who played 20 years in the majors as a catcher and now coaches with the Cleveland Guardians. Alomar came up as a switch-hitter, as did his brother, Roberto. His father made the two boys switch-hit at a young age. Sandy dropped hitting left-handed his first year in the minors, while Roberto, who continued, compiled 2,724 hits, 210 home runs and 12 consecutive All-Star appearances. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Rutschman, Lindor and Cleveland’s José Ramírez are among the game’s best switch-hitters today. Ramírez made his sixth All-Star team this year and Rutschman made his second. Lindor did not make the team, but his season was good enough to justify another All-Star bid.

Reds third baseman Jeimer Candelario is one of the few American-born switch-hitters, but he skews the numbers a bit. He counts on the U.S. side because he was born in New York City, but his father moved the family to the Dominican Republic when he was 5 to open a baseball academy. Candelario worked on a plan developed by his father to hit from both sides of the plate every day as a child.

Latino players made up about 30% of major league rosters last year. They made up more than 60% of switch-hitters.

“It’s not easy,” Candelario said. “Not every day is going to be perfect, but it’s the consistent work every single day. If you don’t fall in love with it, you’re not going to have success. You have to love it.”

Not everyone believes in the concept. New York Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez, who batted .268 with 260 home runs over 17 years as a left-handed-hitting third baseman, marvels at what Lindor can do, but he does not encourage others to try it.

“You’re two different people, two different swings,” he said. “Because the body moves differently. You’re right-hand dominant, now you come to the left side and your right hand is on the bottom. You’re training two different swings.”

Alex Miklos played Division I baseball at Kent State, where he was a three-year captain and led the nation in triples in 2014. He is an owner of BioSport Athletics, a baseball and softball facility in suburban Cleveland that opened two years ago and has trained more than 900 athletes. He estimates that roughly half of the players who have trained at BioSport are position players. Out of those 450 to 500, he said about 10 have asked about switch-hitting and three or four have worked on it consistently.

“There’s no such thing as being too early. The earlier the better,” Miklos said. “But there’s definitely too late.”

Youth sports have become so competitive in the United States that players feel that every at-bat matters, even on the club level or travel leagues, Miklos said. It can be difficult for young players — and their coaches — to give away at-bats in games to work on player development, such as a right-handed hitter learning to bat left-handed.

Whether the number of major league switch-hitters begins to increase again, particularly in the United States, will depend on how it is handled in the youth leagues going forward. The data is not encouraging.

Of about 140 of baseball’s best prospects listed on FanGraphs’ preseason list, from Class AAA to rookie ball, 34 were switch-hitters who had yet to make their MLB debut. Eight were Americans.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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