Switch pitcher a twin threat
Yankees hopeful Venditte throws from both sides of mound
DUNEDIN, FLA.— Hitting a pitched baseball is difficult.
Even the world’s most talented batters manage it only once every three at bats.
So it seems a little unfair when a pitcher shows up with twice as many throwing arms as everybody else.
That’s what the Dunedin Blue Jays had to face Thursday when Pat Venditte and his New York Yankees farm team came to town.
Venditte is a switch pitcher, the only one in pro baseball, and the only one to do it consistently in more than 100 years.
He’s been throwing with both arms his whole life, but he says he wasn’t a double-armed child prodigy.
“It was forced,” the 26-year-old reliever explains. “There was no natural ability from the left side.”
Venditte, who grew up in Omaha, Neb., is naturally right-handed and not ambidextrous. “I can’t do anything else left-handed.”
When he was three years old, Venditte’s father taught him to throw with his left hand, figuring it might give him an extra sporting edge on other kids.
With practice and endless repetition, he became proficient.
“I don’t have overpowering stuff from either side, so I needed that advantage where I can face the hitters left-on-left and right-on-right, so that my stuff has a little bit of chance.”
Batters generally have a tougher time hitting from the same side the pitcher throws because of the way breaking pitches — such as curveballs and sliders — move away from them, making it harder to put the barrel of the bat on the ball. Batters also see the ball a fraction of a second less than when the pitch is thrown from the opposite side of the mound.
Big-league teams stock their bullpens with lefties and righties to employ the strategy late in games, sometimes just for a single out.
Not only does Venditte switch arms, but throwing styles, too. He has a more traditional overtop delivery when right-handed, but is a sidearm pitcher when he turns southpaw.
His right-arm fastball reaches about 90 m.p.h.; his left arm, about 85 m.p.h. He has a nasty slider from the left, and both a slider and curve from the right.
He uses a custom-made six-finger glove, with a thumb slot on both sides, so he can easily slip it on either hand.
Baseball has always had switch hitters — former Blue Jays’ second-baseman Roberto Alomar hit from both sides of the plate, for instance — but Greg A. Harris, a former Montreal Expo, is the only switch pitcher to have played in the majors in the modern era — and he only pitched one ambidextrous inning in September 1995.
So what would happen if two switch players faced off?
The conundrum was tested in his minor-league debut, in June 2008, when he was pitching in the New York-penn League for the Staten Island Yankees in a game against the Brooklyn Cyclones.
In the bottom of the ninth inning, Cyclones’ switch hitter Ralph Henriquez came up to the plate as if he would hit from the right side. So Venditte put his glove on his left hand. Henriquez then stepped out of the batter’s box and switched to the left side. Venditte switched his glove back to the right hand. Stalemate. Both Henriquez and Venditte threw their arms up and appealed to the umpire as if to say, “Make him pick a side!”
“This very situation might create a change to the rule book,” the prescient play-by-play man opined.
“The Pat Venditte Rule” states that the pitcher must indicate his throwing arm first, before the batter steps into the box.
On Thursday, at the Blue Jays’ minor-league complex, Venditte got John Talley to ground out pitching from the right side, then Kevin Ahrens from the left. He then stepped off the mound and signalled to the umpire with his right hand as switch hitter Ivan Contreras came to the plate. Contreras took his spot on the left side, and struck out swinging.
Venditte posted a 3.40 ERA in 51 relief appearances last season with the Trenton Thunder of the Double-a Eastern League. He expects to be with the Thunder again this season, but is hoping to continue to climb through the Yankees system to earn a spot in their big-league bullpen one day.
He says he can’t fool anyone anymore. Advanced scouting at the pro level makes it tough to catch other teams off-guard. But that wasn’t always the case.
“When I was in Little League another parent came up to my Dad and said, ‘Hey, the twins pitched a good game today.’”