The Seattle Mariners drafted pitcher Jurrangelo Cijntje out of Mississippi State with the No. 15 overall pick in the 2024 MLB Draft. Cijntje hails from the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, and his father was a professional baseball player as a catcher in the Netherlands. That’s a cool backstory already, but it’s hardly what makes Cijntje so fascinating.
Cijntje is the rare “switch pitcher,” a phenomenon that has rarely been seen throughout baseball’s eternal history. As the story goes, Cijntje was born a natural lefty, but he wanted to be like his dad, who threw with his right hand. Cijntje learned how to do both. He played in the Little League World Series in 2016, and then moved to Miami for the end of high school career, where he earned scholarship offers as a switch hitter and switch pitcher.
Cijntje took the mound on Friday night as the Mariners faced the Cleveland Guardians in MLB Spring Training. He showed off his ambidextrous pitching in the fifth winning, when he followed a 92 MPH lefty pitch with a 95 MPH right pitch. Watch the video of Cijntje’s ultra-rare switch-pitching here:
What’s so cool about Cijntje is that he has a different arsenal depending on the hand. As a righty, he throws a fastball in the mid-90s, a slider in the 80s, and a changeup. As a lefty, he relies more on a fastball in the low 90s and more of a sweeper in the low 80s. Cijntje throws harder and more accurately as a rightly, but he can induce more groundballs throwing with his left arm.
MLB Switch Pitcher history and rules
MLB reportedly had a few switch pitchers in the 19th century, but went almost the entire 20th century without one until Greg A. Harris did it with the Montreal Expos in his second-to-last game in 1995.
Baseball didn’t really see a switch pitcher until Pat Venditte broke into the majors in 2015 at age-30. Venditte spent five years and pitched 72.1 innings during his Major League career, and he’s perhaps best known for getting MLB to instate a rule about switch pitchers. The “Pat Venditte Rule” essentially states that pitchers cannot change arms while facing the same batter. The pitcher must indicate to the batter and umpire which hand he’s pitching with, and can’t change hands until that batter is retired.
Venditte was the journeyman in the truest sense of the word. What makes Cijntje so exciting is that he was talented enough to be a first-round pick, and could eventually emerge as a dependable Major League pitcher or maybe even a star.
You can read more on Cijntje’s background here. He’s likely to start the season in the minors, but here’s hoping it won’t be long before we see this switch pitcher at the MLB level.
