Why do lefties have the sweetest swings?

Braves slugger and two-time National League MVP Award winner Dale Murphy was at a loss for answers one September day in 1988. He hadn’t gotten a hit in nearly a week, and he couldn’t find a way to snap out of his slump at the plate.

As he continued trying to tinker with his swing mechanics, Murphy looked up at the television, where he saw the Giants playing. At the plate was Giants first baseman Will Clark. As he continued watching, Murphy got into his batting stance.

“He told me he stood facing the TV,” Clark said. “But it’s like the reverse image when you’re standing in a right-handed batting stance while being lined up with a lefty batting on TV. He said he was looking at some of my swings and trying to mimic that while watching the TV.

“The ultimate form of flattery is when another pro is trying to mimic you.”

Murphy wasn’t the only one. Clark, who was one of the game’s premier hitters in the late 1980s and early 1990s, had one of the most beautiful swings in baseball history, a sweet stroke that drew comparisons to Stan Musial’s and was a major reason he became known as “Will the Thrill.”

As great of a hitter as Murphy was, he couldn’t mimic Clark’s swing -- partly because of its pristine fluidity, but also because Murphy was right-handed.

The question has baffled baseball players, coaches and fans alike for as long as the game has been played: Why does it seem like all the sweetest swings belong to left-handed hitters?

“I don’t know why the lefties look … for lack of a better word, more fluid,” Clark said.

He’s not alone in his perplexity when it comes to that question.

“I don’t know,” said former Yankees slugger and Blue Jays bench coach Don Mattingly, whose beautiful swing from the left side earned him the nickname “Hit Man.” “It just looks different, I’m not quite sure why.”

“I wish I could give you a good reason,” said 2021 Hall of Fame inductee Larry Walker, whose sweet left-handed stroke produced 383 home runs over a 17-year career with the Expos, Rockies and Cardinals.

“I don’t know why,” said another former Rockies slugger, Carlos González. “It just looks cool from the left side.”

Fred Lynn, another sweet-swinging lefty who was the 1975 American League MVP, didn’t have the answer, either. But he wonders if the former pitcher known as the “Spaceman” would know.

“If you asked Bill Lee,” Lynn said with a laugh, “he’d probably say because the earth is spinning the opposite way from the way left-handers are swinging.”

With how flummoxed we’ve been over the years as to why this phenomenon exists, maybe we should look into the earth rotation idea.

Lynn, Mattingly, Clark, Walker and González are members of a fraternity of left-handed hitters throughout baseball history who captivated us with their beautiful swings. There are many others, including Ken Griffey Jr. -- who had perhaps the sweetest swing of them all -- Ted Williams, Keith Hernandez, George Brett, Tony Gwynn, Mark Grace, Rafael Palmeiro, and the list goes on.

Even though no one has been able to pinpoint exactly why this phenomenon exists, it hasn’t stopped those in and around the game from offering up their theories.

“Maybe it’s just because there are more right-handed hitters than left-handed hitters,” Walker said. “So when a lefty comes along it seems more rare, which makes it more sweet.”

González, whose ferocious left-handed swing was equal parts assault and ballet, agreed that there seems to be a rarity factor at play.

“When you have so many right-handed hitters, everything with them becomes normal,” he said. “But once you have someone like Griffey, who really impacted the game, with the hat backwards and the beautiful swing, the beautiful bat drop, I think that’s what captivated everybody. That’s the reality -- just being rare is what gets everybody’s attention.”

As a boy growing up in Venezuela, González would beg his mother to let him stay up late at night when local channels televised MLB games to showcase Venezuelan players such as Freddy Garcia and Carlos Guillen of the Mariners. A young CarGo saw enough of Griffey to begin mimicking his legendary swing.

“Everything you saw from me is because of Griffey,” said González, who was a batting champion, three-time All-Star and two-time Silver Slugger Award winner with Colorado. “Whenever there was a picture of him in a newspaper or a magazine, I used to cut it up and place it on the wall and try to emulate his swing. So that’s the way it started, and over the years I made my own adjustments, and that’s the way my CarGo swing was created.”

González said that one of the most crucial elements to his swing was the amount of time his bat would travel through the hitting zone. His swing path maximized the bat’s exposure to that critical area, enabling him to produce hits even if he was fooled on a pitch or late on a fastball.

Clark underscored that point because it was a huge ingredient to his success as well.

“I was just more worried about staying on the plane of the baseball,” Clark said. “All of the good hitters, when they came down to first base, they always talked about staying on plane with the baseball, the reason being you don’t have to have absolutely perfect timing. You can catch it a bit late, you can catch it on time, you can catch it out front -- you’ve got a good chance of getting a base hit that way.”

Could that be part of the explanation for why we love lefty swings? That they tend to be longer through the hitting zone, making for a more attractive motion?

If that’s the case, why would lefties have longer swings than righties? Could it be because there are so many more right-handed pitchers out there, giving left-handed hitters the advantage of having a fraction of a second longer to see a pitch from righties?

“I’ve thought about that,” said Lynn, the only man to hit a grand slam in an All-Star Game, launching one to right field at Comiskey Park off the Giants’ Atlee Hammaker in 1983. “You see a lot of right-handed pitchers, a lot of offspeed and breaking stuff coming at you, especially if you can hit the fastball. So you have more time to look at it. When I faced lefties, I had less time because you don’t see it as well and you’re a little bit quicker with the swing because you don’t see it quite as well.”

Mattingly said he thinks that while there are certainly built-in advantages to being a left-handed hitter, he doesn’t know how that would translate into a sweeter swing.

“Hitting left-handed, you see way more righties in your life,” Mattingly said. “That’s definitely an advantage. But I think the swing mechanics really are the same from both sides. Like you look at a guy like Manny Ramirez and then you compare him to a really good left-handed hitter -- the mechanics of that are gonna look a lot alike, like with the time you touch down and when you actually get the bat through the zone.”

So if the swings are mechanically similar in many left-handed hitters and right-handed hitters alike, why does it still seem smoother from the left side?

There’s another theory that has been floated in the past, one which could be key to answering our great question: left-handed hitters are able to naturally go into their stride toward first base after completing their swings, whereas right-handed hitters have to turn their hips back toward the plate in order to begin their sprint toward first base.

“I never thought of that,” Mattingly said. “That is really interesting, because that’s kind of true, right? Because as a righty, you hit it and you kind of have to think about getting out of the box, and with the lefty it’s more like hitting it and then just sliding right out of the box.”

If there’s anyone who knows batting stances, it’s Gar Ryness, also known as “Batting Stance Guy” on Twitter -- if you’re a baseball fan, you may have seen his incredible impressions of different batting stances throughout history. Surely he has pondered the topic.

“Good question,” he said. “If you think of where swings ‘should’ finish, the lefty is closer to starting to run to first. The righty has to abruptly stop whatever smooth swing he has and begin running to first base.”

Is there merit to this theory? What if baseball was played clockwise instead of counterclockwise -- in other words, what if you ran to third after putting the ball in play, rather than to first? Would the righties be the sweet swingers in that world?

Believe it or not, some early forms of baseball were played with clockwise baserunning. According to “The Book of Sports” by Robin Carver, which was published in 1834, the rules for “rounders,” a precursor to the modern game of baseball, called for clockwise baserunning.

Since we can’t go back to 1834, we’ll need a little modern technology to see what it might look like to play that form of the game, and more importantly, how lefties swinging and then running to first base would look as righties swinging and running to third. Is the “sweetness factor” still there?

Let’s start with the “King of Swing,” if you will: Griffey. If we reverse the image on the video below, we see that Griffey’s inimitable swing remains beautiful from the right side as he makes his way toward first (third) base. It seems the fluid motion of going right into his home run trot off the backswing works from both sides.

We see the same phenomenon with Clark’s swing -- mirror the image, in this case of Clark’s grand slam in the 1989 National League Championship Series against the Cubs, and it looks just as smooth from the right side of the plate as he transitions from backswing to home run trot.

Mattingly had a sweet swing, but back troubles made him hunch over while moving out of the box. Other than that, the mirror image is just the same in terms of the swing itself.

Now, what about the opposite situation -- would a right-handed hitter look any better from the left side of the plate if we mirrored the image? Whom might we turn around in that case?

“There are some right-handers that you sit there and you look at -- like you look at a guy like Edgar Martinez,” Clark said. “And you’re like, man, that one’s awesome from the right side.”

When Clark identifies a beautiful swing, your ears perk up. So here’s a look at Martinez, whose swing is as smooth as silk, as if he hit lefty:

As you can see, Martinez's swing is still gorgeous if we turn him around, but the "smooth factor" breaks down as his feet get moving toward first base. The flow is interrupted, as Batting Stance Guy pointed out.

So where does all of this leave us?

It seems there are multiple factors involved in making the sweet swings we all love occur mostly from the left side of the plate. Lefties are, indeed, more rare -- even in other sports, there’s often a feeling that a lefty is smoother than a righty, whether it be on a quarterback’s throw (think Steve Young) or a jump-shot in basketball (think Dick Barnett, whom Lynn mentioned specifically). And in many cases, lefties have longer swings through the hitting zone because they are afforded a split-second longer to see a pitch from a righty than a right-handed batter.

But the most convincing theory appears to be that lefties can glide out of the batter’s box and transition directly into their trot toward first base out of their backswing. Video evidence supports it, and in an alternate universe in which baseball is played clockwise, we might very well be awestruck by the same players and the same swings as we are now.

Of course, if another variation in that alternate universe was the direction in which the earth spins, who knows whether that result would hold? Well, the “Spaceman” probably would.

While the metaverse is definitely a thing, we’re dealing in reality here, and doing a little mirroring of some old footage can go a long way toward answering a question that has baffled the baseball world from the beginning.

Left-handers have always been in the minority in this world. But when it comes to baseball, they’re special -- it’s why left-handed pitchers tend to have longer careers than righties, for example. The explanation for that is a bit clearer than why lefties have the sweeter swings at the plate.

Perhaps we’re a little bit closer to the answer. In any case, we’ll continue to enjoy the distinct pleasure of watching a beautiful left-handed swing.

“It’s a right-handed world,” Lynn said. “There just aren’t that many lefties. But in baseball, when you see a certain lefty swing, it’s like, ‘Man, that’s just smooth as butter.’”