First published in Vanity Fair, August 1983.
Of all current psychological fads, none has transgressed the border between fact and overextended fantasy so far as the supposed distinction between right and left brains. This fashion, like so many, has a root in firm and fascinating fact. The two halves of our brain are not mirror images, and the asymmetry of form underlies important distinctions of function. Language and most sequential, logical operations are generally localized in the left brain. Spatial and other styles of perception often labeled as gestalt or analog are monitored by the right brain. In one study, for example, people were asked to think about a piece of music. Those who tried to remember the melody activited their right brains, while those who visualized the notes on a staff of music activated their left brains. Cerebral asymmetry also runs beyond our own species; songs of most male birds are more profoundly altered by experimentally induced lesions of the left brain than of the right.
Overextended, even silly, speculation has issued from this interesting foundation—speculation fostered, I suspect, by the apparent resonance of left and right brains with several facile dichotomies of our popular press. The left brain is rational, the right intuitive; the left reflects linear and logical Western culture, the right, contemplative and integrative Eastern thought. The left, Harvard pretension; the right, California psychobabble. This invalid extension often overwhelms common sense, thus meeting our criterion for identifying fads.
For example, neurologists have long known that a curious crossover occurs between brain and body, so that the left brain regulates the right side of the body, while the right brain controls the left side. Our culture also displays a lamentable prejudice toward right-handedness, a bias deeply embedded in nearly all Western languages, where right is dextrous (from the Latin dexter, or “right”), Recht (or “justice” in German), droit (or “law” in French), and, well, just plain right—while left is sinister (from Latin for “left”) or gauche. If we overextend the theme of cerebral asymmetry, we might be tempted to trace this prejudice to our Western bias for rational over intuitive thought, since the favored left brain controls the valued right side.
Fritjof Capra makes such a claim in The Turning Point, his polemic against reductionist thinking in Western science. Our preferences for right-handedness, he claims, reflect “our culture’s Cartesian bias in favor of rational thought.” Yet this proposal, superficially attractive, makes no sense on further reflection. The originators of our language had no notion of neurological crossover and, if they thought about it at all, would probably have figured that each brain controlled its own side (a right-minded view)—if they even knew about divided brains. The obvious reason for our prejudice lies in the simple frequencies of handedness and our unfortunate tendency to despise, and even to fear, the uncommon. For some unknown reason, right-handedness prevails overwhelmingly in all human cultures—and most of these cultures have tried to convert their deviants to the path of righteousness. My grandmother, a natural lefty—I am a righty by the way—wrote haltingly with her right hand because her left had been tied behind her back in turn-of-the-century Hungarian schools. Common sense dictates that the source of our pro-right prejudice lies in simple frequency nurtured by xenophobia—not in neurological knowledge that our ancestors could not have possessed. Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father because most of us skewer our enemies and write our Bibles with the same hand.
Right-handedness is so much more common that we might ask whether lefties follow the usual distinction of right and left brains—or whether their cerebral hemispheres might not be reversed as well. In fact, we find both patterns. Most lefties show the standard distinction, with language in the left brain and most spatial patterning in the right, but some display the reversed difference, with language in their right brains. Lefties often exhibit another interesting distinction from righties—and mark this point well, as the source of the bogus claim we shall soon discuss: their brains are often less lateralized than those of righties; that is, the two hemispheres of lefties are often more similar in their performance, with much overlap of function and less distinction between linear and integrative skills. Thus lefties are often more imperfectly handed, and closer to ambidextrous in their performance, than righties. (Handedness, by the way, also extends beyond the human species. Cats and dogs show paw preferences, and rats tend to turn one way or the other.)
We love fads, none more these days than overextensions of legitimate differences between right and left brains. We hear that women are right-brained, that Chinese are right-brained, that we’d all be better off if we heeded our neglected right brains. I suppose that the argument had to spill over into baseball some day, where the oldest of ancient observations proclaims that left-handed hitters have a small but certain edge over righties. Aha, it must be those right brains that critics of Western culture are trying so hard to cultivate. But wait, before we get too intrigued with another extension of a hot fad, let’s consider the equally ancient and obvious commonsense explanation for the edge that lefties enjoy. It is also well known that batters do better against pitchers of the opposite hand—for the obvious reason that balls served from the opposite side are more clearly seen. Righties do better against left-handed pitchers; switch-hitters invariably face their oponents from the opposite side. (I would also not discount the equally old argument that lefties gain a slight advantage from standing closer to first base—that must be good for beating out a few infield hits per season.)
The standard explanation for higher batting averages among lefties invokes the same argument about frequency that invalidated Capra’s claim. Since most people are righties, most pitching comes from the right side and lefties gain their traditional edge. I counted the first 1,000 pitchers listed in The Baseball Encyclopedia, and 77 percent of them are or were righties. This explanation is so commonsensical and, well, right-minded that I can’t imagine any other serious contender. But challenged it was, and, of all places, in the staid New England Journal of Medicine for November 11, 1982, in a note by John M. McLean, M.D., and Francis M. Ciurczak, Ed.D., titled “Bimanual Dexterity in Major League Baseball Players: A Statistical Study.”
McLean and Ciurczak first found that lefties are overrepresented among baseball players; the well-known edge is clearly exploited. Among current major league players, they count 324 righties and 177 lefties, or 35 percent lefties (in contrast with the 23 percent I calculated for pitchers). When we consider the top hitters of all time, lefties are in the majority, 76 to 63.
New York Giant Mel Ott hits left-handed in the 1936 World Series against the Yankees. Credit: AP/Wide World Photos
McLean and Ciurczak then considered batting averages, but first they divided left-handed batters into “pure” lefties, who both bat and throw with their left hands and “mixed” lefties, who bat left but throw right. The pure lefties had higher batting averages, while mixed lefties neatly match the righties in both categories. For all players active in 1980, righties average .264, lefties who throw right .260, and pure lefties .281. For the top hitters of all time, righties average .314, lefties who throw right also .314, and pure lefties .322.
McLean and Ciurczak reason that since lefties who throw right apparently enjoy no advantage in hitting, the traditional explanation must be abandoned—for these mixed lefties also face as much right-handed pitching and stand as close to first base as their pure colleagues. As an alternative, they probe the current fad and come up with a hypothesis based on right and left brains. Only the pure lefties, they argue, display the relative weakness of lateralization discussed above—that is, pure lefties do not have as strong a dominant hand as either pure righties or lefties who throw right. Thus lack of a strongly dominant hand must confer some advantage, since bats are held with both hands. They conclude, in typically dense, but decipherable, scientific prose: “This relative but pervasive lack of lateralization in left-handers may in some manner contribute to the motor function of the nondominant hand, thereby enhancing a dexte
rity that clearly requires the concert of both hands.”
I reject this explanation and believe I can show, from McLean and Ciurczak’s data, and from some of my own compilation, that the commonsense explanation based on greater frequency of right-handed pitching still holds. If I am correct, I must provide an explanation for why lefties who throw right do not bat as well as pure lefties.
Forgive the appeal to philistinism. I well remember that on my stickball court all us righties were incessantly experimenting and trying to hit left-handed, while the few natural lefties among our friends remained smugly content with their lot. We all knew the advantages that accrue to lefties, and we tried to avail ourselves of them, usually without much luck.
Yet some experimenters did enjoy success and did manage to convert themselves into left-handed hitters. Most of these people continued to throw right. Thus many left-handed hitters who throw right are not true lefties, but natural righties who have trained themselves to bat left. This must exact some toll upon batting averages. I also assume that most people who both bat left and throw left are natural lefties. Therefore, lefties who throw right tend to bat more poorly than pure lefties because many of them are not natural lefties and they balance the edge that they enjoy swinging left with the disadvantage of playing against a natural bent. Thus pure lefties do better not because their brains are less lateralized, but for the traditional reason: they see more right-handed than left-handed pitching and, as natural lefties, suffer no compensating disadvantage of playing against an inborn disposition.
My traditional explanation would gain some support if I could show that large numbers of players really do force themselves to hit lefty against a natural inclination. McLean and Ciurczak’s own data supply such a hint. I was surprised by the high frequency of lefties who throw right in their study—they actually outnumber the pure lefties in all categories. Among all recorded players, 1,069 bat left but throw right, while only 694 are pure lefties. Among active players, 91 are mixed, 86 pure, while for top hitters, 45 are mixed and 31 pure. By comparison, righties who throw left are rare birds. Among top hitters, we find only 2, in contrast with 45 lefties who throw right.
But McLean and Ciurczak also counted some controls—high school and grammar school students not headed toward the major leagues. In these data, two items support my claim. First, pure lefties now outnumber those who hit left but throw right (25 to 10 for high school students and 11 to 3 for grammar school students). Second, lefties who throw right are no longer more common than righties who throw left (10 vs. 12 for high schools and 3 vs. 5 for grammar schools). It seems that non-baseball players are not struggling to bat left, and that the exaggerated number of mixed lefties among major league players must therefore represent, largely, a group of natural righties who have forced a change upon themselves and must pay for it with lower batting averages than pure lefties.
I was able to corroborate this conclusion by my own compilation of pitchers. I reasoned that since pitchers do not pay much attention to their own hitting (where absence of a designated hitter rule still permits them to bat), we would not find the same concentration of lefties who throw right among pitchers. On counting the first 1,000 pitchers listed in The Baseball Encyclopedia, I found 686 pure righties, 171 pure lefties, 84 who bat left and throw right, and 59 who throw left and bat right. The differences between batters and pitchers are much greater than I would have imagined and must, I believe, be explained as I propose—by the argument that many batters who are natural righties have trained themselves to bat left, and pay a price for it.
To reiterate, among all players, 694 are pure lefties, while 1,069 bat left but throw right; but among pitchers, 171 are pure lefties, while only 84 bat left and throw right. Moreover, among pitchers, lefties who throw right are about as common as righties who throw left, while among hitters, lefties who throw right seem to be about ten times as common as righties who throw left.
I won’t close with the yahoo’s blare of gimme that old-time religion, the traditional way has triumphed over newfangled science. Rather, simple common sense about handedness seems to edge out a faddist proposal based on overextended reasoning, just as pure lefties continue to edge out us poor, dextrous, ordinary, right-minded, northpaws.
Why No One Hits .400 Any More
Comparisons may be odious, but we cannot avoid them in a world that prizes excellence and yearns to know whether current pathways lead to progress or destruction. We are driven to contrast past with present and use the result to predict an uncertain future. But how can we make fair comparison since we gaze backward through the rose-colored lenses of our most powerful myth—the idea of a former golden age?
Nostalgia for an unknown past can elevate hovels to castles, dung heaps to snow-clad peaks. I had always conceived Calvary, the site of Christ’s martyrdom, as a lofty mountain, covered with foliage and located far from the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem. But I stood on its paltry peak last year. Calvary lies inside the walls of Old Jerusalem (just barely beyond the city borders of Christ’s time). The great hill is but one staircase high; its summit lies within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
First published as “Entropic Homogeneity Isn’t Why No One Hits .400 Any More” in Discover, August 1986.
I had long read of Ragusa, the great maritime power of the medieval Adriatic. I viewed it at grand scale in my mind’s eye, a vast fleet balancing the powers of Islam and Christendom, sending forth its elite to the vanguard of the “invincible” Spanish Armada. Medieval Ragusa has survived intact—as Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia. No town (but Jerusalem) can match its charm, but I circled the battlements of its city walls in fifteen minutes. Ragusa, by modern standards, is a modest village at most.
The world is so much bigger now, so much faster, so much more complex. Must our myths of ancient heroes expire on this altar of technological progress? We might dismiss our deep-seated tendency to aggrandize older heroes as mere sentimentalism—and plainly false by the argument just presented for Calvary and Ragusa. And yet, numbers proclaim a sense of truth in our persistent image of past giants as literally outstanding. Their legitimate claims are relative, not absolute. Great cities of the past may be villages today, and Goliath would barely qualify for the NBA. But, compared with modern counterparts, our legendary heroes often soar much farther above their own contemporaries. The distance between commonplace and extraordinary has contracted dramatically in field after field.
Baseball provides my favorite examples. Few systems offer better data for a scientific problem that evokes as much interest, and sparks as much debate, as any other: the meaning of trends in history as expressed by measurable differences between past and present. This article uses baseball to address the general question of how we may compare an elusive past with a different present. How can we know whether past deeds matched or exceeded current prowess? In particular, was Moses right in his early pronouncement (Genesis 6:4): “There were giants in the earth in those days”?
Baseball has been a bastion of constancy in a tumultuously changing world, a contest waged to the same purpose and with the same basic rules for one hundred years. It has also generated an unparalleled flood of hard numbers about achievement measured every which way that human cleverness can devise. Most other systems have changed so profoundly that we cannot meaningfully mix the numbers of past and present. How can we compare the antics of Larry Bird with basketball as played before the twenty-four-second rule or, going further back, the center jump after every basket, the two-handed dribble, and finally nine-man teams tossing a lopsided ball into Dr. Naismith’s peach basket? Yet while styles of play and dimensions of ballparks have altered substantially, baseball today is the same game that “Wee Willie” Keeler and Nap Lajoie played in the 1890s. Bill James, our premier guru of baseball stats, writes that “the rules attained essentially their modern form after 1893” (when the pitching mound retreated to its current distance of sixty feet six inches). The numbers of baseball can be compared meaningfully for a century o
f play.
When we contrast these numbers of past and present, we encounter the well-known and curious phenomenon that inspired this article: great players of the past often stand further apart from their teammates. Consider only the principal measures of hitting and pitching: batting average and earned run average. No one has hit .400 since Ted Williams reached .406 nearly half a century ago in 1941, yet eight players exceeded .410 in the fifty years before then. Bob Gibson had an earned run average of 1.12 in 1968. Ten other pitchers have achieved a single season ERA below 1.30, but before Gibson we must go back a full fifty years to Walter Johnson’s 1.27 in 1918. Could the myths be true after all? Were the old guys really better? Are we heading toward entropic homogeneity and robotic sameness?
These past achievements seem paradoxical because we know perfectly well that all historical trends point to a near assurance that modern athletes must be better than their predecessors. Training has become an industry and obsession, an upscale profession filled with engineers of body and equipment, and a separate branch of medicine for the ills of excess zeal. Few men now make it to the majors just by tossing balls against a barn door during their youth. We live better, eat better, provide more opportunity across all social classes. Moreover, the pool of potential recruits has increased fivefold in one hundred years by simple growth of the American population.
Numbers affirm this ineluctable improvement for sports that run against the absolute standard of a clock. The Olympian powers-that-be finally allowed women to run the marathon in 1984. Joan Benoit won it in 2:24:54. In 1896, Spiridon Loues had won in just a minute under three hours; Benoit ran faster than any male Olympic champion until Emil Zatopek’s victory at 2:23:03 in 1952. Or consider two of America’s greatest swimmers of the 1920s and 1930s, men later recruited to play Tarzan (and faring far better than Mark Spitz in his abortive commercial career). Johnny Weissmuller won the one-hundred-meter freestyle in 59.0 in 1924 and 58.6 in 1928. The women’s record then stood at 1:12.4 and 1:11.0, but Jane had bested Tarzan by 1972 and the women’s record has now been lowered to 54.79. Weissmuller also won the four-hundred-meter freestyle in 5:04.2 in 1924, but Buster Crabbe had cut off more than fifteen seconds by 1932 (4:48.4). Female champions in those years swam the distance in 6:02.2 and 5:28.5. The women beat Johnny in 1956, Buster in 1964, and have now (1984) reached 4:07.10, half a minute quicker than Crabbe.
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Page 12