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Oakland A’s to call-up ambidextrous pitcher Pat Venditte

By Kyle Franzoni

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Switch-hitters are an oddity in baseball, but Pat Venditte has a step-up as baseball’s only ambidextrous pitcher.

Pat Venditte has always had a different way of looking at things. When he steps on the rubber and peers in sixty feet, six inches he has the ability to look at his day-to-day situation from two sides and come at it from the best possible angle.

That’s because Pat Venditte is equipped to get batters out as both a left and right-handed pitcher, and now he gets a chance to do it on the game’s biggest stage.

According to Gary Sharp of 1620 The Zone, the Oakland Athletics are set to call-up switch-pitcher Pat Venditte from Triple-A Nashville, where he’s been dominating Pacific Coast League hitters with both hands, posting a 1.36 ERA with a 9.0 K/9 ratio and holding opposing hitters to a .167 batting average against.

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Dominating Triple-A hitters in a notorious hitter’s leagues was apparently enough for the A’s to promote Venditte for his first taste of the Major Leagues and he’ll join the team in Boston, where the Athletics are set to begin a weekend series with the Boston Red Sox. Venditte will be added to an A’s bullpen that currently ranks dead last in ERA and has allowed a .258 batting average against in 161 innings of work in 2015.

For Venditte, this is a culmination of a dream. Drafted in the 20th round of the 2008 draft by the New York Yankees out of Creighton University, Pat Venditte spent six seasons in the minor leagues and went to three spring trainings with New York, but was never given any real consideration at the Major League level. However, he turned heads in February 2015 when, in his first spring with the A’s, made 11 appearances and was one of the last cuts of camp.

While Venditte is more than a mere sideshow attraction, he still comes to the big leagues with his own set of rules to follow. With the ability to switch hands to match-up against both left and right-handed batters, a special rule needed to be created for when he faces switch-hitters. After one memorable at-bat where he and the hitter kept changing sides before the first pitch was thrown, baseball made it a rule that as the pitcher, Venditte needs to commit to which hand he is going to throw with before the hitter steps into the box. The hitter can then change accordingly from there and both are then required to stay put. The exchange was caught on the video below.

Regardless of approach, Pat Venditte has just one duty; get Major League hitters out. He’ll get his first shot at doing so on Friday night, and he’ll take it one hand at a time.

(h/t Sports Illustrated)

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