The Who

(Photo by Steve Dormer)

My name is Mike and I am a pitcher. A left-handed pitcher to be exact.

Luckily for me, being a left-handed pitcher opens doors and offers opportunities that might not develop otherwise if I was right-handed.

An apt analogy is to compare the competitive advantage I gain by being a lefty with being a blonde woman. It’s common knowledge that blondes get more attention from men and are just assumed to be more attractive and sexy than women with other hair colours.

The same assumption holds for left-handed and right-handed pitchers. Since the left-handed population as a whole is so small, a left-handed pitcher is considered a rare and valuable commodity. Hitters rarely get to face left-handed pitching, so when they do they are at a disadvantage due to their unfamiliarity with a lefty’s release point.

That is why so many major league clubs have left-handed specialists on their pitching staffs. Their only duty is to get left-handed batters out (a pretty sweet gig if you can get it).

For me to contact independent league teams and attend tryouts as just a regular pitcher, I am going to get a lukewarm response at best. I’m just one of many and I lack a defining characteristic to make myself stand out. Plus, if I don’t throw 90 miles an hour I might as well not show up.

However, if I go to a tryout or call a team and say that I’m a left-handed pitcher, that little nugget of information will immediately pique their interest and automatically give me a leg up on the competition.

It’s like the line-up outside a busy nightclub. The bouncer, doing his best Patrick Swayze in Road House impersonation, scours the line to ensure the best-looking girls are inside the bar and not waiting outside. Suppose two girls of equal attractiveness, one blonde and one brunette, are milling around the entrance making eyes at the faux Dalton. The blonde is getting in first. Every time.

Therefore, I think it’s safe to conclude that left-handed pitchers are the hot, sexy blondes of baseball. Although I am left-handed, and supposedly ‘hot’ and ‘sexy’ in baseball terms, for the early part of my career the best term to describe my pitching ability would be ‘ugly duckling’.

If any teammates from my formative years found out that I was trying to play professional baseball (even at an independent league level), they would undoubtedly recommend me for psychiatric evaluation and they would be one hundred percent correct in that assertion.

I only began pitching because I was left-handed and I lacked the other skills necessary to be an average baseball player. On the mound, I was the epitome of a thrower, not a pitcher. I literally had no idea what I was doing. The inability to replicate consistent mechanics and severe control problems were my downfall.

To borrow a phrase from Crash Davis in Bull Durham, I “couldn’t hit water if I fell out of a fucking boat.” Unfortunately for me, I also did not possess a million dollar arm like Nuke Laloosh. My arm wouldn’t have been able to buy anything at the dollar store.

I hit rock bottom during the summer after my freshman year in college at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I had a lacklustre first season that saw me begin the year as a starter (after an uncharacteristic dominating tryout) and end up relegated to the bench by the time playoffs rolled around.

I managed to finagle my way onto a travel team in the summer and the coaching staff tried to overhaul my mechanics before every game in the bullpen and then send me out to the mound with shaky confidence and a new delivery.

It was a recipe for disaster. I lasted less than six weeks with that team and put up some of the worst numbers of my career. It was embarrassing walking out to the mound each game. I began to dread every outing and I seriously contemplated quitting the game.

However, something clicked during my second year at school. I trusted my own mechanics—to hell with those coaches—and realized that I didn’t have to throw as hard as I could on every pitch. I just needed to focus on throwing strikes and pounding the zone. And it worked. I became a pitcher, not a thrower.

I had a tremendous sophomore campaign which saw me become the ace of the staff and culminated with a pitcher of the year award. Over the next three years at Queen’s, and one at Durham College for a graduate program, I became a dominant pitcher in Canadian university baseball. I regularly led my teams in the pitching Triple Crown categories and won two more Pitcher of the Year awards.

Since my collegiate career has ended, I’ve played senior rep baseball in Ontario, which is the highest level of purely amateur baseball in the province. And I have definitely become a much better pitcher since I left school. A fervent commitment to strength and conditioning over the past two years has allowed me to enjoy the same, if not better, pitching success in a much tougher league.

I throw harder right now than I ever have (How hard? I’ll be getting on the gun periodically throughout the winter to document my velocity) and I have the strength and stamina to throw harder in the last inning of games then I do in the first inning.

I’m sure right now you’re saying, “Blah, blah, blah. Stop waxing poetic at how great you are and prove it with some numbers or facts to back up your claims”, and I don’t blame you. Check out the 2010 stats and notes link at the top of the page for proof that I’m actually not terrible.

Tune in next Wednesday for The Where/How.