Culture
Why one of baseball's unique skills, switch hitting, is trending toward extinction
CLEVELAND — Francisco Lindor is a natural right-handed batter who desperately wanted to switch hit as a child to be more like his heroes. His brother and his cousin were both switch hitters, as was his favorite player, Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar.
Lindor pleaded with his father, Miguel, to bat left-handed. Miguel fought against it for years because Lindor was such a good hitter from the right side. Why intentionally make yourself worse by doing something so unnatural? It didn’t make sense.
“That was the way my dad forced me to practice,” Lindor said. “If I did everything right, then I could hit from the left side.”
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Now Lindor is part of a dwindling subset of players. Switch hitters are a dying breed in the major leagues, particularly among Americans.
Of the roughly 550 batters to log a plate appearance through the end of June, only 58 were switch hitters, according to Stathead. It continues a trend from last season, when baseball’s switch hitters plummeted to their lowest numbers in 50 years.
Only 26 of those are American-born players, one more than last year, which saw the lowest number among Americans in nearly 60 years.
While Latin players are often encouraged to switch hit as children, it has almost become taboo among youth in America. Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais spent 11 years as a right-handed catcher in the majors. He believes being a switch hitter is the biggest advantage in all of sports.
“Youth baseball in our country has changed dramatically over the last 15 years,” Servais said. “The focus ultimately comes down to college scholarships or getting into pro ball, and the lack of patience in letting those things develop in young players. So they get on Select teams and they’re traveling all over the country and Mom and Dad are paying a lot of money to put you in front of all of the top coaches. Why would we ever put you in a situation where you might fail? And you’re going to fail. Switch hitting is really hard. It’s really hard when you’re young. And they’re afraid of failure.”
Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who had to convince his dad to let him switch hit, is part of a shrinking number of major leaguers who can hit from both sides. (Charles LeClaire / USA Today)
Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh is unsure which side of the plate is his natural side. Raleigh, like Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman, is a triple world score combination of a switch-hitting catcher with power. He has always been right-hand dominant in everyday activities, but from his earliest memories in baseball, the slugging catcher could swing the bat from both sides of the plate because his father made him do it that way.
“Every day I thank the Lord my dad made me a switch hitter,” Raleigh said. “Because I see some of this nasty stuff that’s being thrown up there.”
The number of switch hitters in baseball has been declining for the last decade and finally bottomed out last year, when only 63 of more than 650 players logged at-bats from both sides of the plate. That’s down from an all-time high of 111 switch hitters in 1998. American-born switch hitters peaked at 78 in 1987, according to Stathead.
Carlos Beltrán was a rookie with the Kansas City Royals during baseball’s switch-hitting peak. He played 20 years and hit 438 home runs as one of the best switch hitters of his era. He began toying with the idea after playing winter ball in Puerto Rico with Bernie Williams, who also switch hit. Beltrán struggled so much staying back on offspeed pitches and breaking balls that he wanted to give up and go back to hitting solely right-handed. Kevin Long, now the Phillies hitting coach, was with Beltrán in the minors and encouraged him to stick with it.
“Thank God for Kevin Long,” Beltrán said. “He said, ‘We are so close. Let’s stay with it. Keep trying.’ I was grateful that I had a coach that believed that what I was doing was the right thing. And he didn’t let me really go back to the right side. I don’t know what my career would have been if I only would have been a right-handed hitter.”
Carlos Beltran credits Kevin Long for encouraging him to stick with it in the minors when he was struggling to hit left-handed. (Bob Levey / Getty Images)
Baseball has changed drastically since Beltrán played. The game is more specialized, even at the youth levels, as hitters chase data and cutting-edge metrics. The changes make some of the past greats bristle.
“This generation has lost the ability to hit,” said former Reds star Eric Davis, now a special assistant and roving instructor for the club. “You have a lot of guys today who are caught up in exit velocity and launch angle and they’re not being taught how to hit. They’re not good hitters. So the game is not going to bless them unless you develop a skill to play the game for a long time. And switch hitting for some guys is an avenue to play the game for a long time.”
Davis, who hit right-handed during his 17 seasons in the majors, switch hit early in his career but said he gave it up as a minor leaguer because his coaches told him he didn’t struggle to hit sliders. The majority of switch hitters are natural-born righties learning to hit left-handed. The biggest benefit is to hit sliders from right-handed pitchers that break toward the left-handed batter, rather than trying to hit pitches tailing away as a right-hander.
In youth leagues, however, pitchers don’t throw breaking pitches until they’re teenagers, and most don’t develop great movement until closer to high school. It leaves kids struggling to hit from a side of the plate where they aren’t comfortable and aren’t having success. And they’re doing it to hit breaking pitches that won’t actually start breaking drastically until years later.
There is no magic age to begin switch hitting, but various hitters and coaches polled on the subject believe the right age to start ranges from 9 or 10 years old up to around 13. Beltran, who started switch hitting in the minor leagues, is the rare exception. For teenagers who wait until they reach high school, it’s often already too late.
“If you have problems with sliders and you want the ball coming toward you rather than going away from you, work on being a switch hitter,” said Cleveland Guardians veteran coach Sandy Alomar Jr., who played 20 years in the majors as a catcher. Alomar came up as a switch hitter like his brother, Roberto. His father made both boys switch hit at a young age. Sandy dropped hitting left-handed his first year in the minors, while Roberto compiled 2,724 hits, 210 home runs and 12 consecutive All-Star appearances as one of the greatest switch hitters of all time. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.
Rutschman, Lindor and Cleveland’s José Ramírez are among the game’s best switch hitters today. Ramírez made his sixth All-Star team this year and Rutschman made his second. Lindor did not make the team, but his season was good enough to justify another All-Star bid.
Guardians third baseman José Ramírez, who competed in this year’s Home Run Derby, is among baseball’s best current switch hitters. (Jerome Miron / USA Today)
Reds third baseman Jeimer Candelario is one of the few American-born switch hitters, but he actually skews the numbers a bit. Candelario counts on the U.S. side because he was born in New York City, but his father moved the family to the Dominican Republic when he was 5 to open a baseball academy. Candelario worked on a plan developed by his father to hit from both sides of the plate every day as a child.
Latino players comprised about 30 percent of major-league rosters last year. They made up more than 60 percent of all switch hitters.
“It’s a lot of work. It’s not easy,” Candelario said. “Not every day is going to be perfect, but it’s the consistent work every single day. If you don’t fall in love with it, you’re not going to have success. You have to love it.”
Not everyone believes in the concept. Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez, who batted .268 with 260 home runs over 17 years as a left-handed hitting third baseman, marvels at what Lindor can do, but he doesn’t encourage others to try it.
“You’re two different people, two different swings,” he said. “Because the body moves differently. You’re right-hand dominant, now you come to the left side and your right hand is on the bottom (of the bat). You’re training two different swings.
“You can have a right-handed at-bat and feel really good. In that same game, you can go lefty and think, ‘Oh crap, where’s my swing?’”
Alex Miklos played Division I baseball at Kent State University, where he was a three-year captain and led the nation in triples in 2014. He is now co-owner of BioSport Athletics, a baseball and softball facility in suburban Cleveland that opened two years ago and has trained between 900 and 1,000 athletes ranging in age from 7 up through the professional ranks. Miklos estimates that roughly half of the players who have trained at BioSport are position players. Out of those 450-500, he said about 10 have asked about switch hitting and only three or four have worked on it consistently.
“There’s no such thing as being too early. The earlier the better,” Miklos said. “But there’s definitely too late. It’s something you have to commit to. By the time you’re 13 or 14 years old, you’ve established patterns. It’s really tough to develop that ability from the other side of the plate.”
Youth sports have become so competitive in the U.S. that kids feel like every at-bat matters, even on the club level or travel leagues, Miklos said. It can be difficult for kids — and coaches — to “give away” at-bats in games to work on player development, such as a right-handed hitter learning to bat left-handed.
Whether the number of major-league switch hitters begins to increase again, particularly in the United States, will depend on how it is handled in the youth leagues going forward. The data isn’t encouraging.
Out of about 140 of baseball’s best prospects listed on FanGraphs’ preseason list, ranging from Class AAA down to Rookie ball, 34 were switch hitters who had yet to debut.
Eight were Americans.
GO DEEPER
Missing Bats, Part 1: How an obsession with strikeouts upended the balance of baseball
(Photo of Francisco Lindor: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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