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Pat Venditte

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Baseball Player

The Resume

    (June 30, 1985- )
    Born in Omaha, Nebraska
    Pitcher for the Oakland Athletics (2015), Toronto Blue Jays (2016), Seattle Mariners (2016), Los Angeles Dodgers (2018), and San Francisco Giants (2019)
    Switch pitcher (throws both left and right handed)

Why he might be annoying:

    Although an ambidextrous pitcher and a left-handed batter, he is exclusively right-handed when performing non-baseball related tasks (writing, eating, golfing, etc).
    He uses a specially-made glove with six fingers and two thumbs so he can field with either hand.
    The first time he faced a switch hitter in the minor leagues, it resulted in a seven-minute standoff (the batter would start at one side of the plate, Venditte would switch hands, the batter would go to the other side of the plate, Venditte would switch hands again, the batter would go back to he side he had started at, etc.) until the umpires were called on to intervene (June 19, 2008).
    Shortly thereafter, baseball adopted a ‘Pat Venditte rule,’ requiting an ambidextrous pitcher to declare which hand he will use at the start of an at-bat.
    Through the end of the 2019 season, his career ERA was a less than stellar 5.03.

Why he might not be annoying:

    His father began training him to throw with both hands starting at age three.
    He is the only pitcher of the modern era to regularly throw with either hand. (Although Greg A. Harris, normally a right-handed pitcher, had been allowed to pitch left-handed against two batters in his final game.)
    By splitting his pitches between his arms, he is able to pitch longer than mono-armed pitchers before becoming fatigued.
    Due to the uniqueness of ambidextrous pitching, he sometimes gets mistaken for twins.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 12 Votes: 8.33% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 16 Votes: 81.25% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 18 Votes: 38.89% Annoying