Lefties

It's well-accepted wisdom that left-handed starters perform worse in Strat leagues than they do in real life, especially in small and medium leagues. (Ours would be regarded as medium; although it's only 12 teams, we limit ourselves to the player pool of the 16 teams in the NL.) Is it true?

To find out, I took a look at the stats, specifically how teams did against left-handed and right-handed starters. (One of the stats on the first page of the Team Stats display.) That gave some support for the notion; only one team finished with a substantially worse record against lefties than righties. (Two others finished at .500 against LH's, and 2 games above that for RH's). That team was Castaic, which finished 71-56 versus RH's (.559), but only 15-20 (.429) against LH's. That might just be due to luck, though: the team hit and slugged almost identically versus both (.268 BA, .454 SA against lefties, .268 BA, .460 SA against righties).

Averaging it out, over the course of a full season teams would have wound up winning about 7 more games if they'd faced all left-handed starters than if they'd faced all right-handed starters. Excluding Castaic, it was a difference of almost 10 games.

Then I checked left-handed starters. That wasn't as difficult as it sounds; turns out that there were only 10 lefties in our league who pitched more than 150 innings. Of those 10, exactly half gave up at least a hit per inning more than they did in real life, and two others saw their H/9 rise by at least .5. Only one had an H/9 at least .5 less than in real life. That wasn't because the lefties were all on bad teams, either. West Allis went 86-76, but their two top starters, Dontrelle Willis and Chris Capuano, didn't perform nearly as well as their stats indicated they should. Capuano, for example, was 20-13 with a 3.99 ERA for Milwaukee in 2005; for the Cheesewedgers, he managed only 8-10 and a 4.83.

Which makes me feel so, so much better for having cut him instead of Al Leiter two years ago...

Then again, it may be that starters just don't do as well in Strat leagues, regardless of which arm they use. I went back and checked the teams that had those left-handed starters, and their rightie counterparts didn't fare any better: of the 7 RH's, 4 had H/9's over a hit higher, and 1 had an H/9 half a hit higher. Roy Oswalt of the Maulers, for example, went 22-13 with a 2.94 ERA and 9.0 H/9 for Houston in 2005; for Maui, those stats were 15-12, 4.36, and 11.2.One thing I did note, though: while no LH starter substantially overperformed, several RH's did. Matt Clement and Brad Penny, for example, both shaved over a run off their real-life ERA's. Clement's H/9 was 9.0 for Boston, 7.4 for Roswell.

Bottom line: my guess is left-handed starters aren't the disaster some claim them to be, but the chances of them performing worse than they did in real life is much greater than that they'll perform better. You'll get more even performance out of right-handers.