If I had a baseball card it would say ‘Bats L Throws R’

I’m theoretically right-handed. I write with my right hand, type messages into my phone with my right hand and throw a ball with my right hand…but for almost everything else I do, I default to my port-side hand.

I suspect – but can’t prove – that my parents detected my left-handedness at birth and turned me around as an infant. (If they had known how much a mediocre left-handed pitcher could make in the Major League, they might have reconsidered that decision.)

Anyhow, I became a kind of hybrid, using my left hand to hold a phone, open a jar lid and eat with a fork, and my right hand to swing a tennis racket, paint a wall and operate tools. My guitars are strung for a right-handed person, which I always considered odd because the left hand does most of the work, and my drums were arranged for a right-handed person as well.

So that brings me to baseball.

When I was a little kid, the boys in my neighborhood played baseball on a small patch of grass in my friend’s side yard. There was no left field to speak of, just a garage a few feet behind third base, which meant that about once a week, someone would hit a ball over the bag and break out the window in the garage. The offender had to pay for repairs.

About the time my parents decided they didn’t like buying new glass for the garage window, it occurred to me that right field was a lot of green grass with no garages and no windows to break, so I got the brilliant idea to start batting left-handed. It was awkward at first, but if I did manage to hit the ball, it would find its way into that cool ocean of green. Eventually, I got pretty good at it.

When I started Little League, my dad informed me that I was right-handed and would therefore bat accordingly, so I did as he instructed. However, in my effort to be both productive as a hitter and look good doing it, I developed a “hitch” in my swing and became the pop-out king of the Fairmont Lions Baseball Club.

I didn’t play ball for several years after Little League, but in college I started playing slow-pitch softball. With nothing really to lose, I started batting left-handed again. Because I was naturally right-handed, batting lefty was uncomfortable at first, meaning I had to concentrate on my mechanics to produce a level, effective swing. When I did that, it was like a miracle. The “hitch” went away and I became a decent singles hitter, consistently hitting the ball over the second baseman’s head or, if I caught an inside pitch, sharply down the right field line.

I was still a skinny guy with no real muscles to speak of, so I was never going to hit home runs, but I did get a lot of hits and I was pretty fast, so I got on base a lot and could go from first to third on a single and score on a sacrifice fly. I played softball well into my 40s and might have played longer if I hadn’t been transferred out of town.

So when people asked me why I threw with my right hand but batted from the left side, I told them this story, which usually bored them to tears. I don't play softball any longer, but I'm still telling the story, which means I have probably bored you to tears as well. 

For so it goes.