Maple Leaf Mystery

Canadians! They walk among us, only revealing themselves when they say something like “out” or “sorry” or “I killed and field-dressed my first moose when I was six.” But we don’t get to hear baseball players talk that often, so how can we tell if a baseball player is Canadian? Generally there are three warning signs:

1. They have a vaguely French-sounding last name
2. They have been pursued by the Toronto Blue Jays¹
3. They bat left-handed and throw right-handed

¹ I honestly thought Travis d’Arnaud was Canadian until just now

Wait, hold on. What’s up with that third one? This merits a bit of investigation.

Full disclosure: this is not new territory we’re covering here. Others have noticed the lefty-righty leanings of Canada, and it’s hard not to when they run out rosters like this for the World Baseball Classic. But the explanation everyone gives is far too easy for my tastes.

What gives?

The answer, experts believe, is that most quintessentially Canadian pastime – hockey.

“Most of the conversation revolves around the dominant hand and its position on the bat and/or hockey stick,” says Gord Ash, former general manager of the Blue Jays and now assistant GM with the Milwaukee Brewers.

“There is constant debate on the role of the top hand or bottom hand as it relates to power.”

Most naturally right-handed tykes starting out in hockey will hold the stick with the left arm extended down the shaft and with the right hand at the top, under the tape. The majority of sticks sold in Canada are left-handed. When youngsters pick up a baseball bat, it feels natural to keep the left hand on top of the right hand and, thus, hit left-handed. The right hand goes to the nob.

Admit it — this was your first thought too. And it makes some sense until you ask yourself this follow-up question: why do Canadians hold the hockey stick that way in the first place? Because not everyone agrees on the best way to hold a hockey stick.

Roughly 60 percent of the Easton hockey sticks sold in Canada are for left-handed shots, Mountain said. In the United States, he said, about 60 percent of sticks sold are for right-handed shots. Figures over the years from other manufacturers have put the ratio discrepancy between the two countries as high as 70 to 30.

The difference even trickles over into golf, where the swing is not unlike that of a slap shot. According to the Professional Golfers Association, 7 percent of Canadian golfers play left-handed, which is proportionally more than any other nationality. The reason is probably that Canadians pick up a hockey stick first and are therefore imprinted by the time they take up golf. Especially if they are from Quebec, where hockey players are even more left-handed than players in the rest of Canada.

Oddly, British Columbia — sometimes said to be the most American-like of the Canadian provinces — skews the other way². “The rest of the country goes 2 to 1 in favor of left sticks, but it’s reversed in B.C.,” said Marc Poirier, a customer service representative who handles Canadian orders for Warrior Sticks.

²This bit is particularly interesting to me, because if you start thinking of some of the exceptions to this rule — Jason Bay, Brett Lawrie, Scott Mathieson — they tend to be from British Columbia³.

³Russell Martin is the exception to this exception.

So if it’s not something innate to playing hockey, what is it? What if — and bear with me here — what if this is a genetic difference between Canadians and Americans we’ve discovered? “But Kudzu,” you might say, “How could we prove such a thing? Short of sequencing the Canadian genome, you’d have to conduct some sort of controlled experiment, where you take two Canadians, marry them, move them to California, make them have a kid, have him play baseball but never hockey, and see how he hits and throws. But there’s no one like that, right?”

Photo by Keith Allison licensed under CC-by-SA-2.0

Yep, Freddie Freeman! Both of his parents were born in Ontario, but he was born in Orange County. From what I can tell, he’s never played hockey. And of course, he bats left and throws right. He’ll fit right in on Canada’s World Baseball Classic this spring, where I assume he and Joey Votto will play first base simultaneously.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say this doesn’t definitively answer the question of why Canadians hit like they do. But I don’t believe hockey is the answer. Maybe it’s just inertia — people start doing something a certain way, then teach others to do it that way, and so on. On the other hand, who knows, maybe there’s something else going on. And Freddie Freeman is exhibit A.