A long-time baseball fan, I remember watching the Hollinger Miners dominate a gold-mining industrial league in 1948. Since then, I have always wondered why there are switch hitters in Major League Baseball, but no switch pitchers?
When I forced my lazy brain to figure out why, the only answer I could come up with was that, all things considered, it’s too difficult to develop the musculature on both the right AND left side of the pitcher’s body, to meet the onerous physical demands of a winning pitcher. Obviously, if it was easy or uncomplicated, it would have been done by now.
But then I started thinking, actually it was more imagining, what if there was an unusual family situation where two young parents, with college athletic backgrounds, decided they were going to raise their son to one day be a totally competent ambidextrous pitcher? Once the boy agreed he wanted to be a unique baseball player, his parents would carefully train him, starting at age five, with a professionally-designed regimen, to develop this unique, rare skill. There would only be one rule from the start: in his daily routine, he could throw the ball as many times as he wanted – 10 times or 100 times – but never from the same side twice. In this way, his life-long muscular memory was developed and completely attuned to an ambidextrous delivery.
Then, when he was 13, they found out he had another rarity: 20/5 eyesight that was four times better than normal.
That’s how the idea for an awesome new baseball novel got started.