Left-Wingers : Baseball: Southpaw pitchers deserve their reputations for unorthodox behavior, but their skills can drive opponents batty.

Left-handers often make great pitchers, which should come as no surprise. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were left-handed, and, Lord knows, they could paint the corners. Thomas Edison was left-handed and he lit up a room, if not a speed gun.

Anything a left-handed pitcher does on or off the field should come as no surprise. Left-handed behavior, although decidedly distinct, is difficult to describe.

Coaches alternately portray left-handed pitchers as wily and wild, crafty and crazy, fearsome and flaky. The lefties generally don’t mind the labels; they’ve known worse. Gauche is the French word for left, as is sinister in Latin.

“No single adjective is adequate,” said Scott Muckey, the coach at Crespi High. “Just call them left-handers. That says it all.”

In the Valley area this season, call them pervasive.

Left-handed aces on Southern Section staffs include Alemany’s Joey Rosselli (1.86 earned-run average in 1989), Hart’s Andrew Lorraine (2.13, 101 strikeouts), Simi Valley’s Kenny Hood (1.56) and Westlake’s Mike Eby (1.61).

Three left-handed pitchers--senior Scott Barkman and juniors Chris Loll and Adam West--figure in Thousand Oaks’ pitching plans. Big things are expected of Manny Fernandez of St. Francis, Bill Egan of Royal, Brian Gordon of Burbank and Matt Bates of Village Christian. Chaminade has four left-handed pitchers.

City Section lefties with the right stuff include San Fernando’s Hector De La Cruz, Kennedy’s Denny Sharp, El Camino Real’s Ryan McGuire, Monroe’s Sean Henson, Chatsworth’s Danny Rodriguez and Birmingham’s Jason Mansfield.

“Beating a good left-hander is a great challenge,” said Mike Scyphers, coach at Simi Valley. He should know: Left-handed pitchers have eliminated Simi Valley from the playoffs the past three years.

Indeed, among high school pitchers, the left hand is the upper hand. Reasons include the movement on left-handers’ fastballs, the ability to prevent runners from stealing second base and the fact that batters face fewer left-handers than right-handers.

Also . . .

“You never know what to expect from those guys,” Muckey said. “They are liable to do anything out there.”

You are a coach and your team is scheduled to face a left-handed pitcher. Who ya gonna call?

Employing a lineup of right-handed-hitting gauche-busters is the conventional wisdom in the major leagues. A right-handed batter can see a curve thrown by a left-hander better because the ball breaks toward him.

“It’s much more difficult to hit a curve that is breaking away from you,” said Bud Murray, coach at Hart High.

The strategy is less effective in high school because a left-hander’s fastball is very difficult for a right-handed batter to hit. Although no one seems able to explain why, a left-hander’s fastball tails away from a right-handed hitter, giving it the effect of a right-handed slider.

“The best high school pitch is the fastball; the slider and curve are the bread-and-butter pitches in the pros,” said Steve Marden, coach at San Fernando. “A high school pitcher normally doesn’t have command of his breaking pitch enough to throw it consistently for strikes.

“But a left-handed tailing fastball has the same movement as the right-handed slider you see at a higher level.”

Strong right-handed pull hitters, the players who bat third, fourth and fifth in most high school lineups, are especially vulnerable to the tail. And if they crowd the plate and try to take the pitch to the opposite field?

Alemany’s Joey Rosselli, who has confounded hitters well enough to have earned a scholarship to Arizona State, explained: “I’ll start a right-handed power guy with a tailing fastball on the outside corner. Then I’ll come inside with the slider, which breaks in and down. He’ll hit it off the hands or beat it into the ground.

“If I get two strikes on him, I’ll throw the next pitch shoulder-high and let it tail outside. A lot of hitters chase that pitch.”

Just as futile are efforts to detail the tail.

Said Scyphers: “Maybe it’s the way left-handers follow through. It’s a mystery to me.”

Said Murray: “It just seems to be something natural those damned guys do.”

Tom Thompson, who as a veteran college and high school umpire is afforded a close-up view, has a far-out explanation: “A left-handed pitcher has a tendency to have a loose arm, thereby allowing more natural movement on the fastball.”

Andrew Lorraine, a Hart High left-hander whose tail prevails enough for him to average 1.3 strikeouts an inning, asked his physics teacher for a scientific explanation. “He had no idea,” Lorraine said.

The teacher isn’t the first expert to be perplexed by left-handers. A study by two right-handed psychologists that appeared two years ago in the prestigious British journal Nature shows that left-handed baseball players on average live about eight months less than right-handers.

Last September in the same journal, a left-handed statistician from Canada revealed new data showing the opposite--that left-handed baseball players actually live an average of two years longer.

Contemplating their own mortality were batters who faced Wally Ritchie, a Glendale College left-hander in 1985 who now pitches for the Philadelphia Phillies.

“He was mean. He’d nibble on the outside corner until he had two strikes, then he’d bust inside with a fastball that would tail just enough to catch the inside corner,” said Thompson, who would then call strike three. “He had guys bailing out all day.”

Perhaps no athlete in sports is accused of breaking the rules more than a left-handed pitcher attempting to prevent a runner on first base from stealing. That crooked motion, those darting eyes . . . you’d think he’s the one planning a heist.

“Most lefties cheat,” Alemany Coach Jim Ozella said of their pickoff move to first. “Half the time they balk, and when they don’t, you’re getting fooled and goofed around.”

Because a right-hander in the set position has his back to first base, his move depends on quickness. Being left-handed requires underhanded methods; a lefty with an effective move is practiced in the art of deception,

“My question to myself is, can a runner read me?,” Lorraine said. “I don’t give a runner my best move right away. Then, when I go for the out, I convince the runner I’m going home by driving my shoulder and right knee back.

“I step halfway between home and first and BOOM, I throw to first.”

And hope the base umpire screams “Out” rather than “Balk.”

Just as the best trapeze artist flirts the most with death, the best left-handed pickoff move is the one closest to a balk. Two rules are central to a left-hander’s move to first base. Fans usually can listen to loud dissertations between managers and umpires on these rules whenever a left-hander is on the mound.

Rule 1: If a lefty kicks his right foot behind the rear edge of the pitching rubber when he coils, he must throw a pitch. A crafty left-hander, therefore, kicks the foot close to the line, looks at home plate, and zips a throw over to first.

Rule 2: A pitcher must step toward the base he throws to, including home plate. Not directly toward the base, but closer toward that base than any other. A wily left-hander, therefore, steps inches shy of the halfway point between home and first on a pickoff attempt.

“They will push to the extreme limit, much like a child will do to a parent,” said Thompson, the veteran umpire. “They will test to see what they can get away with with an individual umpire.”

Runners, understandably, have a difficult time figuring out when to break for second. Often they are “hung out to dry,” baseball lexicon for being caught leaning the wrong way.

“A left-hander cuts down on your running game,” Ozella said. “It’s very difficult to steal, so we’ll hit and run more.”

Many teams have opted for an alternative to deciphering a left-hander’s move. When not stealing, a runner avoids leaning toward second too soon by taking a short step back to first base until the pitcher has committed to throwing a pitch.

When stealing, the runner breaks for second the moment the pitcher’s right foot begins to lift off the ground. While the pitcher is working stork-like through his subterfuge, the runner is already in full gallop.

Stealing on first movement is a guessing game. If the pitcher throws to first, an out is likely; if he throws a pitch, a stolen base is almost a certainty. The coach must be a mind reader; he calls for a steal when he believes a pitch, rather than a pickoff, is imminent.

“We steal on first movement,” said Murray, the Hart coach. “We don’t see a lot of other teams doing it, which is kind of dumb.”

Scyphers and Muckey like the first-movement approach, but only against left-handers they believe they can read. Central to first-movement stealing is the realization that when a pitcher begins his motion, he already has decided whether he is throwing to first or home.

“I’ve tried to teach my left-handed pitchers to throw to first when they see a guy break on first movement,” Muckey said. “In every case, we’ve scrapped it within a month. The pitcher is thinking about what pitch to throw and where to throw it. After he’s begun his motion, he just can’t change his mind that fast and throw to first. He either balks or throws the ball over the backstop.”

Ozella and Marden are anti-first movement with their runners.

“I don’t think too many coaches are gonna take the chance to send a runner on first movement,” said Marden, the San Fernando coach. “Boy, that’s kind of risky.”

Risk, thievery, deception--just a few of the delightfully sinister elements a left-hander brings to a ballgame.

Whatever happened to Rick Filippo, the flaky left-hander?

That’s a question Jim Ozella occasionally ponders, but not with the urgency of the first time the thought crossed his mind.

Filippo, a pitcher for the University of Illinois when Ozella was an assistant coach there a decade ago, disappeared after losing a no-hitter in the ninth inning of a game against Oral Roberts. He had walked home two runs early in the game and Illinois trailed, 2-1, heading into its final at-bat.

“We don’t score, the game’s over, everybody’s shaking hands and we can’t find Filippo,” Ozella recalled. “I walk into the clubhouse and he’s sitting there whimpering and ripping his hat apart seam by seam. He cut it into a hundred tiny pieces, mumbling, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’ The rest of the year he had to borrow a hat to pitch.”

Poor Rick Filippo--his brain had gone south, the way of his paw.

The left-handed 15% live in a world where right is a synonym for correct. The more considerate among them scramble for the left side of the dinner table so as not to bump elbows with the right-handed majority.

The pitcher’s mound is a place where they can do the left thing, and do it well.

Yet their reputation for being flaky appears to be well-earned. They wear their caps cockeyed, provided they haven’t ripped them to shreds.

Consider the behavior of Adam West, a normally serious junior left-handed pitcher at Thousand Oaks High. West, a member of a Conejo Valley Senior League team playing in a Western regional tournament in Las Vegas last summer, sat down to breakfast one morning with the team.

While his teammates gasped in amazement, he calmly chug-a-lugged a pitcher of maple syrup. Thus fortified, West went out and pitched a two-hitter, striking out 10.

Ozella and Murray insist that Rosselli and Lorraine, their respective left-handed standouts, are not the least bit flaky. Both are good students, hard-working and reliable, their coaches claim. But truth be told . . .

Rosselli missed a month last season because he tripped over a phone cord and fell against his TV stand, breaking a bone in his left hand. “That was a totally left-handed thing to do,” the pitcher said.

Lorraine, bright enough to carry a 3.8 grade-point average, bought a steel toe on the advice of his coach to protect the shoe on his pivot foot. “He put it in the wrong shoe,” Murray confided.

A quality left-handed pitcher often gets the last laugh, however. Because there are fewer of them than good right-handers, lefties are hotly recruited by colleges. “There aren’t enough of them to go around,” Muckey said.

Lorraine is fully aware that, as a left-hander, he is something special.

“The left half of the brain controls right-handers and the right half controls left-handers,” he said. “So, left-handers are the only people in their right mind.”

SOUTHERN SECTION BASEBALL PREVIEWS: C 11-13