Switch Hitters

So I'm having dinner with some friends and the talk turned to sports. Anyway, up here in Nebraska, most people don't know anything about sports except football and cornhusking (which isn't even a sport). Well, I wasn't really paying attention but I heard a sentence that really irked me. My friend was trying to explain why something wasn't done in some sport by using a baseball comparison. He said something close to this.

".......it's about the same as a baseball player batting right, and then switching and batting left handed. It just doesn't happen. No one does it."

What?!!!!!! What crappy baseball team are you a fan of? Well, I just want everybody to know that the term is 'switch hitter' or 'switch hitting'. And a lot of people do it. I took a small survey of percentages of Major League Baseball active players that could switch hit with a sample of 10 randomly selected teams. I found that on a team's active roster, out of the average number of 18 fielders (fielders, not pitchers) an average of 2.5 of them could switch hit. That's almost 14%. Figuring how many of those fielders will play in one game and how many at-bats they will averaged I mathematically concluded another statistic. In an average MLB game, you will see 3 at-bats when the batter is batting from his originally non-dominate side (basically, a right handed batter that is batting left, or vice versa). Now I'm not as big into minor league ball, but I have been to a couple AA games and AAA games. And, I'd say that their percentage is probably no lower than 10%. And, figuring that switch hitting has to be taught at a young age (around 15,16,17yrs) I'd say that the high school percentage is fairly decent too. I guesstimate about 7% or 8%.

Essentially, the concept of batting both right and left is not an unusual feat. So if you wish to explain the extreme rarity of some sporting action, don't not use "switch hitting" as it's comparison. It is a common, acceptable, and encouraged practice.