Good morning and welcome to episode 105 of Effectively Wild, the baseball

perspective daily podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindbergh and no

longer in Tyler, Texas, but back in Long Beach, California, in or around the

Honda Fit is Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. So today is our listener email show.

The traditional Wednesday listener email show that we have occasionally bumped to

other days, but today it will actually be on Wednesday and a bunch of you

sent questions and the questions were good and we're gonna answer some of the

most interesting ones or the ones that were most interesting to us. So Sam has

them all lined up and ready to read. So what's first? Well, first I want to

revisit a question that we answered last week about why left-handed starters are

more in demand than right-handed starters and the great Russell Carlton attempted

to answer this with three points that he thought were relevant and so I

since Russell is incredibly smart and his answers are very savvy. I just

thought I would quickly go over them. The first is the argument from statistics

which is as we kind of mentioned briefly, but Russell actually had knowledge. The

platoon split is the platoon advantage for lefties on lefties is much higher than

the platoon advantage for righties on righties. It's about a double if you go by

yes it's about a hundred point edge for lefties and about a fifty point edge

for righties. So even if you're facing more of the other Russell thinks that

maybe the math works out. So that's one reason. Another is neuro psychology.

Russell says the ball spins differently from a lefty and hitters generally have

different neuron pathways laid down decision pathways and motor responses.

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