The switch-hitter's whole reason to exist is to neutralize the pitcher's platoon advantage.
Lefty pitcher … a switch-hitter bats righty. Righty pitcher … he bats lefty. It's one of the most fundamental strategies of baseball. You switch-hit to gain the best matchup no matter who's on the mound.
But what happens when a pitcher is so weird that the normal platoon "advantage" might actually be the wrong side to hit from?
That's the conundrum the Dodgers' Tommy Edman is facing in the World Series, which is creating one of the more fun mini-chess matches of the postseason.
The Blue Jays' top two starters are Trey Yesavage and Kevin Gausman, the latter of whom Edman is about to face for the second time in Game 6 as the Blue Jays try to clinch a World Series title.
Both Yesavage and Gausman are right-handers. Both throw the same three pitches: fastball, slider and splitter. Both dominate with their splitters.
Edman is the only switch-hitter on the Dodgers' roster. You would expect him to bat the same way against both Yesavage and Gausman.
But in the World Series, he's doing something very interesting: He's batting righty against Yesavage, and lefty against Gausman.
So there are two main questions we want to answer here:
- 1) Why would Edman bat right-handed against a right-handed pitcher like Yesavage?
- 2) Why wouldn't Edman bat from the same side against both Yesavage and Gausman, who throw the same stuff?
The answer to those questions speaks to how tough the Blue Jays' top duo is to face back to back, and about the lengths hitters will go to try to gain whatever advantage they can against elite pitchers.
1) Why Edman hit righty against Yesavage
In Edman's mind, Yesavage is simply tougher against left-handed hitters, even though he's a right-hander. That means the platoon "advantage" of flipping around to bat lefty isn't actually an advantage at all.
So Edman hit right-handed against Yesavage in all five of his plate appearances against the Jays rookie in Games 1 and 5 of the Fall Classic.
"He's just better against lefties than righties," Edman said after Game 5. "That was the main reason."
That much is true. From his MLB debut on Sept. 15 through his 12-strikeout masterpiece in Game 5 of the World Series, Yesavage allowed a .740 OPS to right-handed hitters but just a .449 OPS to lefties, with a 29.7% strikeout rate vs. righties but a 36.3% strikeout rate vs. lefties.
As for why Edman decided Yesavage was a true reverse-split pitcher, who merited the unusual step of batting righty-righty against: It's a combination of Yesavage's splitter, his overall pitch movement profile and his extreme over-the-top delivery.
Yesavage's splitter is his best pitch. It's overwhelmed left-handed hitters all playoffs long. Yesavage has thrown 42% splitters against lefties in the postseason, and his splitter has held those lefties to an .071 batting average while generating a 59% swing-and-miss rate and 61% strikeout rate.
So if Edman batted lefty as usual, he knew he'd be fed a steady diet of those splitters, and a splitter is a pitch you want to see coming toward your barrel, not tumbling away from it. Batting righty would give him a better chance to handle a righty splitter.
In fact, everything Yesavage throws moves toward a right-handed hitter -- his fastball, his splitter and even his slider, which is a strange pitch that breaks the "wrong" way, toward Yesavage's arm side. With Edman batting right-handed, then, everything he saw from Yesavage would move into the path of his bat.
And from his point of view in the batter's box, standing in against Yesavage isn't much like standing in against your normal right-handed pitcher.
Yesavage's 65-degree arm angle is the highest of any pitcher this postseason (higher means a more over-the-top delivery), and so is his average release point of 7.12 feet off the ground. What advantage would a switch-hitter gain by batting lefty against a pitcher like that, when Yesavage doesn't visually resemble all the other Major League right-handers Edman is used to seeing from the left side of the plate?
Edman wasn't quite sure if Yesavage's delivery would be easier to see from the right-handed batter's box than the left -- "I haven't hit lefty against him, so it's hard for me to answer," he said -- but he asserted that Yesavage's unique arm slot influenced him to bat righty.
"I think a big part of it is because of his arm angle, his unique arm angle," Edman said after facing Yesavage for the first time in Game 1. "It made more sense to hit right-handed."
The results were mixed. Edman notched one hit off Yesavage, an infield single, but that was all, and he also struck out once in each game. But the process, despite being counterintuitive, was sound.
2) Why Edman doesn't hit righty against Gausman
That brings us to Gausman, Yesavage's partner in splitter crime. Gausman has the exact same three-pitch arsenal as Yesavage. He has the same No. 1 pitch, his own devastating splitter.
So why, in Game 2, the very next day after facing Yesavage, did Edman turn around and bat left-handed against Gausman? It would seem like those previous right-handed at-bats against Yesavage might pay dividends against a pitcher with a similar profile. The more Edman saw Yesavage's splitter, the better he'd be ready for Gausman's … right?
Well, not really. Yesavage and Gausman are more different than you might think.
Gasuman's splitter is also devastating against left-handed hitters. His numbers this postseason are almost as ridiculous as Yesavage's: 54% splitter usage against lefties with an .074 batting average allowed, 49% swing-and-miss rate and 29% strikeout rate.
But it goes back to the arm angle.
Seeing Gausman's splitter is not the same as seeing Yesavage's splitter.
"I think it's mainly the angle that's the biggest difference," Edman said between facing Yesavage in Game 5 and seeing Gausman in Game 6. "Yesavage's is more just like straight downhill, both the splitter and the slider. And then Gausman is more just kind of a traditional arm slot. The splitter is very deceptive as well. So I think just the arm slot from Yesavage is the big reason I hit righty."
Gausman's arm angle this postseason is almost twice as low as Yesavage's, a much more traditional three-quarters right-handed delivery. Standing in against him is like standing in against the other right-handers Edman is used to facing (albeit with a much better splitter), so it makes sense to bat from his typical left-handed side.
And that lower arm slot from Gausman could make his pitches harder to pick up for Edman if he tried batting righty, since the ball would be coming from the third-base side of the rubber, behind Edman's back.
Gausman has great pitches, but he doesn't have the funky look of Yesavage and the funky movement that comes with it. And Edman has faced Gausman plenty of times before in his career, so he wasn't sparked to try something out of the ordinary like he was against a rookie he'd never seen before.
Like with Yesavage, Edman didn't have great results against Gausman in their first World Series matchup -- he went 0-for-2 with a strikeout batting lefty against him in Game 2. But maybe Game 6 will be different.
And the very fact that a switch-hitter is batting from different sides of the plate in the World Series against two pitchers with the exact same arsenals is a testament to how hard hitting is today, how nasty pitchers are and how the fight for every last edge can turn traditional baseball strategy on its head.
MLB.com's Sonja Chen contributed reporting to this story.