The Lefty Trend, But For Fantasy

There are many ways in which a person can enter a rabbit hole. Some dive straight in. They clap their hands together, give them a little rub, and dive. Others fall in, like a pedestrian walking headfirst into big red flashing “Don’t Cross Right Now” hand signage while staring at their phone with hard-wired headphones getting tangled all up in the obliviousness. This is the story of how one can fall into a lefty versus righty rabbit hole, somewhere between diver and pedestrian.

It all started on a cool, breezy summer day while on vacation on beautiful Lake George, a place that provides an oddly refreshing accidental gulp of lake water while swimming. I read in The Last Manager by John W. Miller and learned of Earl Weaver:

The young manager also came into spring training with a new approach to using statistics. He had asked Orioles public relations director Bob Brown to compile the results of mathchups between every Orioles hitter and pitcher versus every pitcher and hitter in teh America League. He had noted variation in the performance of players against specific adversaries. Boog Powell, for example, might be a mighty slugger but he was toast against Tigers lefty Mickey Lolich.

Hmm. I thought. Boog had trouble with lefties, huh? Powell, who makes an incredible “big turkey with chips”, was not a platoon hitter; he slashed .238/.320/.393 against left-handed pitching and .275/.374/.485 against right-handers in his career. Willy Adames would look at Powell’s against LHP slug line with envy (.215/.303/.388, career). No, Weaver was getting even more meta than platoons. He was focused on specific pitcher and hitter matchups, something that Miller notes is not very predictive. Still, it made me think about platoons and lefties and, at this point in the fantasy season, what kind of Weaver-esque fantasy strings I could pull. I wrote Platoon Hitters to Target In the Final Stretch, hoping to provide some late-season advice, but the results were stark. Recommendations for Rob Refsnyder and Davis Schneider vs LHP and Pavin Smith and Jake Fraley vs RHP? I know you’re in a deep league, but those are admittedly lackluster recommendations.

At this point, I noticed topics on hitter/pitcher handedness were frequenting my mind, but I hadn’t yet fallen totally in to the rabbit hole. I could still see the light of day. Upon return to my home, lake-less land, I had too much yard work to do. I listened to an episode of The Craft to pass the time. Nick Pollack and Eno Sarris were supposed to be going over their rest of the season starting pitcher ranks, but instead, they discussed the results of Stephen J. Nesbitt’s Year of the SouthPaw. It happens.

Why have there been so many incredible lefties this year? Nesbitt’s work provided answers to why the fantasy platoon has not been much of a viable strategy in 2025, most notably, historically small gaps in OPS performance among right-handed batters against righties (.707 OPS) and lefties (.716 OPS). In short, right-handed hitters just aren’t hitting left-handed pitchers like they used to. That’s why we end up fighting over Pavin Smith.

Nesbitt’s article is full of data-backed theories on why the platoon advantage has disappeared, including increased usage of left-on-left sinkers and larger pitch arsenals among lefties. I fell deeper. Down in that rabbit hole, dear reader, I saw frightening things that provided individualistic evidence to Nesbitt’s work. With enough tabs open to make my computer start running cooling fans and a pop-up screen that read, “Buffering…buffering…buffering…”, I saw 17 starting left-handed pitchers with at least 100 IP holding a positive statcast run value per 100 pitches on their sinkers. I saw 16 starting left-handed pitchers (same qualifiers) holding positive value on their changeups. Of those 16 pitchers with positive changeup value, five of them also had positive values on their curveballs.

I closed my laptop and ate fast food. The only way to cure brain fog and promote fantasy baseball enlightenment. When the last curly fry had been consumed, enlightenment came, and I was called to Camden Yards to watch a lefty. I had to see it live. I had to watch Trevor Rogers. It just so happened he shoved. Here is his line from his Sunday outing against the Twins:

7.0 IP, 5H, 1ER, 0HR, 3BB, 9SO

I was lucky enough to be up close, close enough to see what I thought was an unimpressive fastball. But it got swing and miss! In fact, this season’s (so far) 12.7% four-seam swinging strike rate is the best mark of his career on the pitch. Stuff+ grades it as below-average with a score of 90. That means the raw attributes of his fastball should not be getting such swing and miss. How many left-handed starting pitchers with at least 80 IP (Rogers has 83.1) and a 90 or worse Stuff+ grade on their fastball have an ERA below 2.00? One. Trevor Rogers. How many have an ERA below 3.00 besides Rogers? Three. That’s Cristopher Sánchez, Noah Cameron, and Matthew Boyd. But, while Rogers’ fastball has done well thus far, he’s also followed a recipe similar to what Nesbitt laid out in his article. He hasn’t increased his usage of left-on-left sinkers, but he has always thrown it. This season, Rogers has a .285 wOBA on his sinker compared to last season’s (2024: 124.1 IP) .372. That’s a big step forward. Rogers may have been throwing the sinker before the sinker became a cool lefty thing to do, but this year he’s added a sweeper, which he’s thrown exclusively to righties. He’s added more to his arsenal. The real value, and I noticed this first hand when he got two swing and misses in a row on beautifully placed ones, has been his changeup. When Rogers’ fastball and changeup are working in unison, it rains sweet Lake George water:

Rogers has been a top 20 fantasy starting pitcher in 2025 because of this. Just look at this player rater chart:

The red line shows his $18.30 value in 2025, and the green dots connected with a green line show each week’s returned dollar value. Rogers, on the season, is an $18 pitcher! Who else is at or above $18? Well, ok, 18 starting pitchers. But, Rogers? In the top 20? Are lefties more valuable this year than in years past? Only two lefties are sitting in the top 10 as I write, and I’m pretty sure you can guess who they are:

Only two? We’re making a big deal of two lefties in the top ten of all starting pitchers? If we open it up to the top 20, we see more southpaws:

There’s no doubt this season has been unique as it relates to the real-life left-handed pitching talent pool. Nesbitt, and Pollack, and Sarris, and the lefties themselves have made that clear. Is it true from a fantasy perspective? Here’s a table of the percentage of left-handed pitchers in the top 20 going back to 2021:

More lefties have entered the top 20 (so far) this season than in any other season in the past five years. In 2022, seven pitchers (Julio Urías, Shane McClanahan, Nestor Cortes, Max Fried, Carlos Rodón, Clayton Kershaw, and Tyler Anderson) ended the year with top 20 starter fantasy value. But 2025 feels different. Don’t inflate lefties by pre-season value just because lefties were good in 2025. But do give it some thought. The question of, Did something change?, should always be asked. Did the lefty add a pitch? Did they widen their arsenal? Are they striking out righties at elevated rates? There seems to be something there. Lefties have new strategies to help close the gap created by the platoon advantage. If this is a trend, then we should stay informed. If it is just a blip of a season among many, where the winds shifted in the direction of the lefty, so be it.