Platoon Splits, Then and Now: What the Data Shows

Platooning in baseball — the practice of starting different‑handed batters depending on the pitcher’s handedness — has been part of the sport’s strategy for a long time. Even before the rise of advanced analytics, teams understood that hitters generally perform better against opposite‑handed pitchers. The ball is easier to pick up out of the pitcher’s hand, and breaking balls with horizontal movement tend to move in toward the hitter rather than away. Because of these long‑recognized advantages, managers have often adjusted their lineups instead of relying on a single everyday player. For the sake of using one simple stat, I’ll be looking at OPS (on base plus slugging) throughout this article.

Platoon Splits Over Time

First, let’s look at how platooning has changed over time. The red line in the graph shows percentages of plate appearances where the batter had the platoon advantage. Starting in the 1960s and through the 1980s, Platoon advantage increased from 50% to upwards of 60%, before plateauing in the 2000s at around 54%. Without pinpointing whether or not there were intentions to get opposite-handed batters more plate appearances (or the reverse for pitching matchups), we can see the strong correlations with percentage of plate appearances by each batter handedness with platoon advantage %.

Most pitchers in baseball are right-handed, with plate appearances by righty pitchers ranging between 69%-77% throughout history, but mostly hovering around 72%. With that being said, the direct way to increase platoon % is by increasing the number of plate appearances by non-righties. The strongest correlation here is with switch-hitters, who will always have the platoon advantage, and we can visually see the rise and fall of switch hitters in the late 1970s to the late 1990s match the same with platoon %. A quick Pearson correlation test shows a correlation of 85%.

Looking at the graph above, platoon splits are very real, for both righties and lefties. Throughout history, righties have had a worse OPS against the same-handed pitcher by .049 points, and lefties are worse by 0.087. Lefties have struggled more throughout history, likely because the lower volume of left-handed pitchers has them less experienced seeing pitching from the same hand. I was curious to see if platoon splits would be less drastic in recent years because of pitch designing perhaps allowing pitchers to find more strengths against opposite-handed hitters, but that doesn’t seem to be significant yet.

Teams with the Highest Platoon Advantages

The Cardinals of the mid-to-late 1980s (who reached the World Series in 1985 and 1987) show up here a lot, clearly a strategy the team tried to maintain. This coincided with an era where switch hitting was at its most common. Those teams carried an impressive group of switch hitters in their lineups, including Tom Herr, Ozzie Smith, Terry Pendleton, Vince Coleman, Jose Oquendo, and Willie McGee. The 2025 Guardians are another interesting team as a very recent one. The Guardians employed switch hitters Carlos Santana, Angel Martinez, Bryan Rocchio, and of course Jose Ramirez. Gabriel Arias was the only right-handed batter to play more than 70 games.

Most drastic platoon splits by player

Let’s look at the batters with most drastic differences in OPS, with a minimum of 1,500 plate appearances in their career. It’s no surprise that many of these players are left-handed, since we know lefties have a worse weak-side OPS than righties, but a couple things stand out. First, a lot of these players are relatively recent. Daniel Vogelbach is the most recognizable name near the top as someone who just retired. Jim Thome is by far the most successful player on this list. The guy that really stands out to me though is Randy Bush. Bush played 96.6% of his career against right-handed pitching. He only had 119 plate appearances his entire career against lefties. Was he so bad against lefties that the Twins never wanted him to even have an opportunity against them…ever?

What about batters with reverse-platoon splits? As you can imagine, it’s much rarer (only 70 players out of the 2,636 sample have a reverse-split difference of at least .050 in OPS), but the names are just as interesting. Here is the top 25 in reverse splits:

Mike Trout shows up, and a few other recent All-Star players. Greg Maddux is a funny one, as one of only six pitchers with 1,500 plate appearances in the expansion era. Rube Walker is another funny one, as a career catcher who never hit well and seemed to have been platooned despite a lot of success in limited time against lefties.