Cleveland Guardians Batting Bias Persists

The Cleveland Guardians hitting woes are in part due to their bias against right handed batters. To prove this I looked at MLB Pipeline's Top 100 Players and focused on the position players (not pitchers). There are 74 players of which 33 were right handed (44.59%), 28 left handed (37.84%), and 13 switch hitters (they are willing to bat from either side of the plate) (17.57). I then looked at the Guardians top prospects according to MLB and found that there were 20 position players of which 4 (20%) were right handed, 10 (50%) were left handed, and 6 (30%) were switch hitters.

Using ChatGPT, I asked what the probability of having 4 or fewer right handed batters in a sample of 20 would be. The answer was:

Probability of # of right handed batters:

4 1.54944%

3 0.42484%

2 0.08825%

1 0.01157%

0 0.00072%

Summing these probabilities gives a 2.0748% chance of having 4 or fewer right handed batters from a random sampling based on the Top 100 Player distribution. That's unlikely to be the result of a just random variance.

ChatGPT did give the formula it used for computing the probabilities and it was consistent with my recollection from Probability and Statistics that I took a while ago.

The problem with discrimination, be it racial, gender, religious, or hand dominance is that it reduces the number of potential candidates for a position. Doing that means that very qualified people will not be employed. Since 2019 I found that the right handed batters that were selected and developed by the Guardians were Oscar Gonzalez, Ernie Clement, Eric Haase, Tyler Freeman, Jhonkensy Noel, Bryan Lavastida, and Johnathan Rodriguez.

Oscar Gonzalez accumulated 562 at bats before being selected off waivers by the Yankees. Tyler Freeman had 560 at bats with the Guardians before being dealt to the Colorado Rockies for Nolan Jones. Jhonkensy Noel had 351 at bats. Ernie Clement had 269 at bats over two seasons before being claimed by the A's. Johnathan Rodriguez had 102 at bats. Eric Haase had only 26 at bats for the Guardians since 2019. Bryan Lavasrida batted 12 times. So the Guardians farm system produced 1,882 at bats over more than 7 seasons from right hand batters that were not switch hitters or obt

ained via trade. That is remarkably small given a team will normally have more than 5,000 at bats PER YEAR.

In this year's draft the Guardians drafted two pitchers with their first two picks. I can't argue with that, especially with the Guardians success in developing pitchers. Their next two picks were left handed hitters. This is remarkable given the asymmetry on both the big league roster and in the farm system. Something is broken in the office building on Ontario Street and it is the player evaluation models the Guardians use.