One day in 2019, Jorge Aguas picked up his phone and listened to the damnedest scouting report he’d ever heard.
The voice on the other end of the line was Zackery Braafhart, a college baseball player at Florida National University. Braafhart had a cousin back home in Curacao who wanted to play high school baseball in Florida. He hoped that Aguas, the head coach at Champagnat Catholic — a private school in Hialeah, Fla. — would consider taking a look.
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Braafhart explained that his cousin was a shortstop. He wasn’t very tall and was fairly skinny, but he’d played in the Little League World Series three years earlier and was a good student.
“And,” Braafhart added, “he can also throw with both hands.”
Aguas paused.
“Hmmmm,” the coach said, trying to stifle a smile. “Two hands. Innnnteresting.”
The cousin’s name was Jurrangelo Cijntje, and nearly five years later, he remains the most captivating baseball player that Aguas has ever seen. He is a 5-foot-11 pitcher who can touch 99 mph with his right arm and then flip his custom Wilson glove to his other hand and throw a baseball 95 mph with his left. He spent the last two seasons at Mississippi State, where he unleashed his switch-pitching prowess on SEC opponents. But he is much more than a novelty or party trick: He is also a possible first-round pick in the 2024 MLB Draft, a pitcher who might have major-league potential with both arms.
“We have a joke inside the family,” says Braafhart, his elder cousin. “The right side, we call it Picasso because he’s just dominant — he’ll paint. The left side, I call it Seabiscuit just because of the story. It’s gonna catch up to you.”
If nothing else, Cijntje, 21, is the runaway winner for the most interesting prospect in this year’s draft, and that’s only partially because of Picasso and Seabiscuit. Cijntje (pronounced “sane-ja”) was born in the Netherlands, raised in Curacao — the baseball-mad Dutch island in the Caribbean — and schooled in South Florida, where he moved by himself as a teen.
His journey has been improbable, and his path has been laden with sacrifice. But the hardest part might be what comes next: Cijntje must convince an often traditional sport to allow him to do something exceedingly rare: Be a full-time switch-pitcher in professional baseball.
“To be honest, I can’t really explain it to people,” he said one day in early June. “I think it’s something that was already in me.”
The clip is now immortalized on YouTube. Cijntje is 13 years old, playing shortstop for Curacao in the 2016 Little League World Series. A batter from Japan lifts a fly ball into shallow left. Cijntje sprints back to his right, making a nifty, over-the-shoulder catch.
“What a play!” says Dave Flemming, the ESPN broadcaster on the call. “Jurrangelo Cijntje, the ambidextrous shortstop!”
Even by Little League, the secret was out: Here was the kid who could throw with both arms. The origins of the gift, as it happens, began when Cijntje could barely walk. On summer days, he would follow his father, Michelangelo, to the field in Willemstad, Curacao. Cijntje was a natural southpaw, picking up the ball left-handed. But his dad had been a catcher, and Cijntje sought to mimic him.
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“I always forgot my glove at home on purpose so I could use his glove and throw from the right side,” Cijntje said.
To cultivate his son’s talent, Michelangelo fashioned a DIY weighted ball by hammering a box of nails into an old baseball. Then, he set up a tire as a target, allowing his son to aim with both arms. By the time he was a teen, Cijntje had strong mechanics with both arms, but he often gravitated toward shortstop and catcher, which meant he usually threw with his right arm.
To most in Curacao, it was clear that Cijntje was one of the best players in his age group. He starred on a team that represented Curacao in the LLWS; he was a baseball junkie who never stopped thinking about the game. Yet when MLB scouts descended on the island to sign the next crop of 16-year-olds, he measured only 5-foot-5 and was an average runner. With no promising offers, Cijntje’s family devised an audacious plan: They would send him to Florida alone, where he would live in a small two-bedroom apartment with three cousins, Zackery, then 24, Yazir, 22, and Zjeanuwayne, 19, who all came to the U.S. to play college baseball at Florida National. Michelangelo told his son that if no team wanted to sign him, he might as well focus on school while playing high school baseball.
When Cijntje arrived at Champagnat Catholic as a sophomore in 2019, he hadn’t focused on pitching for years. But Aguas, the head coach, was genuinely curious. One day that fall, Cijntje stepped onto the mound. He clocked 85 mph as a right-hander and around 79 mph as a lefty. Aguas shared his idea aloud: “Let’s see what develops.”
Across the next three school years, Cijntje would transform into one of the best high school pitchers in Florida. That he managed to do so, Aguas says, was a testament to his natural talent and drive. During his first two years in Florida, Cijntje shared a queen bed with Yazir and woke up at 5 a.m. each day to catch the bus to Champagnat. The cousins stretched their school meal plans, saving leftovers and subsisting on a diet of chicken and rice. The menu didn’t change, but at least the language used to describe it did. In Papiamento, the Creole language spoken in the Dutch Caribbean, the word for chicken is galiña. So on Monday, Zackery Braafhart said, the boys would have galiña.
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“On Tuesday, we’d have pollo,” he said. “On Wednesday, we’ll have chicken. On Thursday, it was kip.”
When Cijntje finished at Champagnat in 2022, the Milwaukee Brewers drafted him in the 18th round. He opted instead to attend Mississippi State, where he could keep developing as a switch-pitcher. Cijntje had grown to 5-feet-11. His body had filled out.
When one American League team discussed him before the 2022 draft, the scouting director was fascinated by one detail.
“There’s nobody like him.”
The history of baseball is filled with iconic switch-hitters, from Mickey Mantle to Pete Rose, Eddie Murray to Chipper Jones. But switch-pitching? It’s not just rare — for the last 125 years, the act has largely been more of a theoretical idea than a real one. There was a collection of men who were said to switch-pitch in the late 19th century. There was also the story of Greg Harris, a right-handed reliever who, in the last days of the 1995 season, convinced Expos manager Felipe Alou to let him pitch from both sides in the penultimate game of his career. But for the last decade, the legacy of switch-pitching has begun and ended with one man: Pat Venditte, a 20th-rounder from Creighton who managed to claw his way to the big leagues and log 72 1/3 innings for six teams from 2015 to 2020.
Venditte began throwing with both arms as a boy in Omaha, Neb. He was a natural right-hander, but his father was — in Venditte’s words — an “outside the box” thinker. They refined the skill from grade school throughout high school. But still, it wasn’t until after his freshman year at Creighton that he found comfort in a sidearm release from the left side. Venditte didn’t throw hard, at least not by the standards of pro ball, but he did possess the platoon advantage from both sides. When he broke through with the Oakland Athletics in 2015, he was so novel that a newspaper in Oregon mistakenly ascribed him with special powers: “Amphibious pitcher makes debut.”
Venditte — the namesake of the “Pat Venditte Rule,” which requires an ambidextrous pitcher to alert the batter and umpire which hand he will throw with before each at-bat — made his last appearance in 2020. (In his last game, he faced the New York Mets’ Brandon Nimmo from the left side, switched around, and struck out J.D. Davis from the right.) He retired after the season and took a job in Peoria, Ill. But last year, as Cijnjte pitched at Mississippi State, he received a message from the school’s pitching coach. He was looking for tips for training a switch-pitcher.
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There are some things that might seem obvious when it comes to switch-pitching. For one, it requires double the work. To maintain your arm strength, you have to play catch twice each day. When it comes to throwing bullpen sessions, you have to maintain two sets of mechanics. But there are some more subtle challenges, and when Venditte started studying Cijntje’s film to provide some advice, he was transported back to his own career.
“I think the hardest part about what he does that nobody else would understand is when you face three or four right-handed hitters in a row,” Venditte said. “And then the next thing you have to do is locate an off-speed pitch in a critical situation without having thrown a ball in five or six minutes with that (left) arm.”
Venditte suggested that Cijntje find ways to replicate such moments during his side sessions. He recommended visualization techniques and shared his old training methods. But mostly, he was just in awe.
“He is a different beast,” Venditte said. “The paths that we will take to get to the big leagues will be far different. His, I have a feeling, will be fast, whether that’s one arm or two. He’s got the stuff from both sides.”
Cijntje is so much more naturally gifted that Venditte has pondered things he could never do. Whereas Venditte needed the right-on-right and left-on-left advantage to be effective against hitters — meaning he had to switch arms regularly — it’s possible that Cijnjte could be different. Could he start a game right-handed, then be available as a lefty bullpen arm between starts? Could he be his own opener, throwing the first inning from the left side before turning around and pitching the rest of the game right-handed?
The ideas are tantalizing, of course, yet they would require an organization to be open-minded. At the moment, Cijntje throws harder from the right side and he would project as a first-round pick as just a righty. Because of his height, he’s drawn comparisons to Marcus Stroman, and he posted a 3.67 ERA as a draft-eligible sophomore, striking out 113 batters in 90 2/3 innings. To add to the speculation about his future, he ditched throwing lefty in the season’s final weeks, opting to throw right-handed only in the postseason. One MLB scout, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, theorized that teams might prefer to play it safe in the development process.
“I feel like a club might just say: ‘Man, you’ve got really good (stuff) right-handed,’” the scout said. “‘We can maybe let you play catch left-handed to keep it up. But let’s try to develop you as best we can.’”
For now, however, Cijntje says he will tell clubs that he wants to try to pitch from both sides.
“If some team wants me only from the right side, we got to get on the same page,” he said.
Yes, he throws harder from the right side. And yes, his right arm is partially why he’s rated as the 15th-best player in the draft by The Athletic’s Keith Law. But those closest to him have another theory about his switch-pitching. While it’s true that he consistently throws harder from the right, flirting with 100 mph at times, some believe that’s only because he has used his right arm more often. Cijntje is still a natural southpaw, and Braafhart believes there will come a time when Seabiscuit catches up with Picasso.
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“I still believe that there’s gonna come one day where his left side is gonna be throwing harder,” he says.
If Cijntje has questions navigating the draft process, he also has plenty of places to go for advice. He got to know the Sabathia family while playing summer ball with Carsten Sabathia — the eldest son of former Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia. The connection led to him taking on Amber Sabathia as his agent/advisor. He also maintains a friendship with fellow countryman and Atlanta Braves second baseman Ozzie Albies, and his fan club among major leaguers from Curacao is only growing.
“I’m his No. 1 fan,” said Kenley Jansen, the Red Sox’s veteran closer. “Not because he’s doing what he’s doing, but I’m the No. 1 fan of his parents. I’m saying that because at the end of the day, I’m encouraged more by (his path).”
Cijnjte is showing other kids from Curacao that there is a possible route to pro ball through college baseball. It helps, of course, if you can throw harder than 90 mph with both arms. But Jansen believes other late bloomers could benefit from the competition in American high school baseball and college.
In other ways, though, Cijnjte is a unicorn, pushing the bounds of what is possible. Venditte may have shown that a switch-pitcher could make the big leagues. But Cijnjte wants to show that one can thrive.
“I believe, deep down, he wants to prove it,” Braafhart said “And he’s said it multiple times, because we asked him. The No. 1 thing is that he always says: ‘I want to be me.’”
(Photo: Michael Wade / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
