04/18/2012
From my new Taki’s Magazine column:
Baseball season reminds us of the identity-politics group that doesn’t bark — left-handers. Why are certain aggregations of once-persecuted people, such as blacks or gays, so politically potent today, while others, such as left-handers, can be safely ignored?
Indeed, it’s almost gauche to ask why no left-handed big-leaguer has played catcher since the 1980s. … Why is the media so much more fanatical about discrimination against black quarterbacks than against left-handed catchers?
Read the whole thing there.
Lefthanded catchers are like black quarterbacks in that both lefthanders in MLB and blacks in the NFL are highly over-represented, but not at certain positions. The purported shortfall of blacks at quarterback has been a media cause celebre for a generation, while the utter extinction of lefthanders at catcher is the subject of an occasional speculative essay in the nerdier realms of baseball fandom attempting to understand why.
By the way, I’m not lefthanded, nor is anybody particularly close to me.
Odd fact: Obama is the first of the four recent lefthanded Presidents (assuming Reagan was a righthander — he started as a child as a lefthander) to play golf lefthanded. Ford, Bush 1, and Clinton played with righthanded clubs, while Obama uses a lefthanded set.
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