TJ Juvera

U0827899
Term Project
OIS 3440-002

Do Left-Handed Pitcher Have The Advantage

Over Right-Handed Pitchers?
TJ Juvera
April 10th 2019
 TJ Juvera
U0827899
Term Project
OIS 3440-002
Research Question
Baseball has always been a sport about who can get the upper hand on their opponent.
But in baseball the question can be what hand is that? In professional baseball there has always
been the debate of do left-handed or right-handed pitchers have the advantage. With less than
30% of the league pitching left-handed in professional baseball that means that a majority of
the league pitches right-handed. The question and purpose behind this report then becomes
“Do left-handed pitchers have the advantage compared to right-handed pitchers?”

Table above is the batting average of teams against left handed and right handed pitchers from the 2017-2018 season over a
course of 162 games played.

This is our Null Hypothesis below, Our test is to see if Left handed pitchers have the advantage on a team’s batting average
more than a right handed pitcher?

1= Left Handed Pitchers, 2= Right Handed Pitchers

Ho: 𝜇1 ≤ 𝜇2 = 𝜇1 − 𝜇2 ≤ 0
Ha: 𝜇1 > 𝜇2 = 𝜇1 − 𝜇2 > 0
 TJ Juvera
U0827899
Term Project
OIS 3440-002
Visual Data

Left Handed Pitchers vs. Right Handed Pitchers

Washington
Toronto
Texas
Tampa Bay
St. Louis
Seattle
San Francisco
San Diego
Pittsburgh
Philadelphia
Oakland
NY Yankees
NY Mets
Minnesota
Milwaukee
Miami
LA dogers
LA Angels
Kansas City
Houston
Detroit
Colorado
Cleavland
Cincinnati
Chicago
Chicago Cubs
Boston
Baltamore
Atlanta
Arizona

0.000 0.050 0.100 0.150 0.200 0.250 0.300 0.350

Left hand Pitchers Right hand Pitchers

The chart above gives us a visual look at left-handed pitchers versus right-handed pitchers
success. By looking at the graph we can start to get a clearer look at who has the advantage on
a team’s batting average over a course of a season. Along the X axis is the teams batting
average against a left-handed pitcher (Orange) and right-handed pitcher (Blue).
 TJ Juvera
U0827899
Term Project
OIS 3440-002
Solution

t-Test: Two-Sample Assuming Equal

Variances

Right hand Left hand

Pitchers Pitchers
Mean 0.254766667 0.251066667
Variance 0.000218875 0.000194961
Observations 30 30
Pooled Variance 0.000206918
Hypothesized Mean Difference 0
df 58
t Stat 0.996204297
P(T<=t) one-tail 0.161644508
t Critical one-tail 1.671552762
P(T<=t) two-tail 0.323289016
t Critical two-tail 2.001717484

To find the answer that we are looking for we can run a hypothesis test to answer our question,
if left-handed pitchers have the advantage over right-handed pitchers. The reason we ran a
hypothesis test is because it allows us to compare two population means of information. By
looking at the information above we can see that there is a slight difference in the two means
between left-handed and right-handed pitchers. By looking at the means we can see that left-
handed pitcher’s mean is smaller than the right-handed pitcher’s mean. This is a good sign due
to the fact that we want that batting average number to be smaller than the right-handed
pitchers mean, this would mean that when batting against a left-handed pitcher there is less of
a change to hit the ball then there would be when batting against a right-handed pitcher. To
really back our question we can look at our P-value for a one tailed test = 0.161644508, from
this we can see that there is evidence that we DO NOT reject the null hypothesis because your
p-value is greater than 0.05.
In conclusion, there is an advantage to pitching left-handed in professional baseball. Even
though this advantage is very slight there will still be a team somewhere that will pay millions of
dollars to have that slight advantage. Go Yanks!

Ho: 𝜇1 ≤ 𝜇2 = 𝜇1 − 𝜇2 ≤ 0
Ho: 0.251 ≤ 0.255 = 0.251 – 0.255= -0.004 ≤ 0