The Lefty Who Threw Me Curveball

Throughout my youth and into adulthood I played and coached baseball. Like about 90 percent of the other players, I am right handed, which meant I threw the ball right-handed and batted from the right side of the plate. When I was a young, adults often tried to "teach" natural lefties to be righties: the world was built around right-handedness and the goal was to change the children to fit the world. At Meadowfield Elementary School in Columbia, SC, third graders switched from sitting in chairs at small tables to chair-desks, most of which were designed for right-handers, but there were a couple in our classroom for the left-handers. This was the first time I'd ever seen an accommodation like this, although those poor kids still had to twist their bodies in order to make their cursive writing slant in the proper direction.Lefties were considered oddballs, almost like special needs children . . . Except when it came to baseball. In baseball, the exoticness of being left-handed was an…