In baseball, a team will try to balance its lineup and bullpen with left-handed hitters and pitchers. And ideally you want a left-handed first baseman so they can stretch far with their gloved hand while facing the infield. So if they’re looking at players to put on their roster, one player might be chosen over the other based on their dominant hand.
In what other professions, sports or non-sports, might your dominant hand come into play when being considered for the job?
Musician. A lot of musical instruments do come in left-handed versions, but they may not be easy to get your hands on. And some just don’t - the piano, for example.
https://www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk/rec/music.html
However, it still appears that lefties may be overrepresented among musicians, as with other artistic fields, which is kind of interesting.
Conversely, you do not want a left-handed catcher for similar reasons WRT the plate. AFAIK, there’s no such thing as a catcher’s mitt for the right hand.
A WAG, but professional race car driver? I imagine it’s easier using your dominant hand to shift a manual transmission.
And I’ll leave you to decide where the “profession” qualifier fits into this, but almost all firearms (and all military firearms) favor right-hand shooters. Some military firearms like the M249 can only be fired right-handed. There are certain left-handed models of rifles and a handguns on the civilian market (and some firearms, like revolvers, are deliberately ambidextrous) but those of us who shoot left-handed have in general just learned to use right-handed equipment.
There have been left-handed catchers in the past, though it’s definitely been a rarity, particularly in the modern era. Infielder Mike Squires was a left-hander, who did catch in two games as a left-hand-throwing catcher (and, thus, presumably, was wearing a mitt on his right hand) in the late '70s or early '80s; Benny Distefano was a left-hand-thrower, who caught in three games for the Pirates in 1989, and appears to have been the last lefty to appear as a catcher.
https://members.tripod.com/bb_catchers/catchers/catchleft.htm
https://baseballhall.org/discover/left-handed-mitt-shows-importance-of-conservation
From that HOF page:
Due a dearth of left-handed catcher’s gloves in professional baseball, the former Pirate wore his catcher’s mitt on his right-hand, forcing him to catch throws to home plate backhanded – and thereby slowing down the time he had to make a tag.
IOW, Distefano wearing a mitt intended for catchers who throw rightie; Squires presumably did as well.
Sewing machines are all right handed. Left handed sewing scissors are a relatively (40 or so years) new thing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a left handed manual can opener, cork screws are right handed and bottle threads favor the right handed person.
In cricket, as in baseball, teams ideally look for a balance of right- and left-handed bowlers and batters. It’s considered an advantage to have a right- and left-hander batting together because the bowler has to adjust his line every time they change ends.
Football (soccer) teams are always looking out for left-footed players for the left-side positions.
Long since obsolete, but back when rivets were put into ships by men with big hammers, a riveting team would have two riveters, one swinging right-handed and one left, so they didn’t get in each other’s way. IIRC, left-handed riveters were paid a premium because there were fewer of them.
PIloting a helicopter pilot is certainly a problem if you have a strongly dominant left hand. The cyclic, which requires far more fine coordination, is always positioned for the right hand. Or at least - the cyclic is between your knees, but if you use your left hand for the cyclic then the collective (on the floor at the left side of the seat like a hand brake) is in the wrong place for your other hand.
However, here’s a bizarre twist. Some early helicopters like the S-51 only had a single collective between the two seats. So a left seat pilot was obliged to use the left hand for cyclic control.
(And we won’t get into why the French insist on making their helcopter main rotors turn in the opposite direction to everyone else…)
I’m right-handed, but my left eye is my dominant eye, which is an important distinction when it comes to shooting a bow or a firearm.
The one and only time I ever went skeet shooting, I was using a right-handed shotgun (because that was what was available). I was shooting left-handed (so that I could sight with my dominant eye), and it was a little disconcerting to see the spent shells being ejected from the right side of the gun, and seemingly whizzing right past my face.
Left handed boxers have trouble finding opponents on their way up through the ranks. Both right handed and left handed boxers gain a lot of experience fighting right handers, but fighting left handed boxers is unusual for the righties. With both fighters having their feet on the same side in front and leading with their non-dominant hand on the same side really throws off the right handed fighter. More head clashes and tripping over feet is to be expected. Right handers often react the wrong way to movement or contact with the left handed opponent.
So nobody wants to fight left handers until there’s decent money in it. That includes other southpaws, as mentioned their experience is in fighting right handers. Fighting another leftie is just as annoying to them as it is to the right handed fighters.
Lefties fight even fewer lefties than righties do, by one fighter…
I’ve often wondered about stringed instrument players. It has always seemed to me that what the left hand does is much more complicated than what the right hand does.
There is significant piano music for the left hand alone–much, but not all commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein who lost his right arm in WWI, but nothing for the right hand alone. When Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska temporarily lost the use of of her left arm, she was able to adapt, with some difficulty, the left hand music for her right hand. She said she ended up with the strongest right pinky in the business since she had to use it to play notes designed to be played with the left thumb.
I am right-handed but I am blind in my right eye and have been since birth. I learned to shoot left-handed as a kid and now if even hold a firearm right-handed it feels weird and uncomfortable. Having the spent casing flying across your field of vision or bumping into your chest and arms or going down your sleeve just becomes part of the process.
There are certainly left-handed violins available. But it requires a lot of coordination from both hands, so either approach can work. Obviously people do stick to whatever approach they choose. I don’t know what the proportions are among amateurs, but I think the vast majority of classical professional lefties play nominally right-handed. I cannot recall ever seeing an orchestral violinist in the reversed position.
ETA:
Paavo Berglund, OBE, (1929-2012) who was a member of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1949 to 1958, played the violin left-handed. He played a violin made for him by his grandfather and had to be accommodated at the back of the first violins to account for his reverse technique. He is most famous as a conductor, and known for his work in bringing the music of Jean Sibelius to mainstream European audiences.
https://www.violinschool.com/knowledgebase/the-left-handed-violinist
The piano is completely egalitarian in terms of favoring the left or the right hand. The problem lies in the literature; most of it assumes somewhat more dexterity (heh) in the right hand. Still, pianists are expected to develop both hands equally; there are monster passages for the left hand everywhere in standard piano literature, and several concert pianists have been lefties, notably Glenn Gould.
If only someone other than P.D.Q. Bach had composed music for the left-handed sewer flute:
I think the exact opposite is true. It’s natural that the melody will usually be higher pitched, and higher pitches are better resolved and allow greater complexity; so the higher pitched part will naturally be more complex. So there’s nothing arbitrary about the literature having greater complexity in the high pitches. But the literature dictates nothing about which hand must play the high pitches. It’s the piano keyboard that is completely arbitrary and favors dominant righties in having the higher pitched end at the right side. A dominant leftie could play all the literature perfectly well on a mirror-image piano, if anyone made such a thing and they learned that way.
I’m thinking that shopping lanes are made for right-handed cashiers? The belt is to the right of where the cashier is standing. The cashier reaches with the right hand to pick up the items and scan them.
I would think this configuration actually disfavors righties due to the fact that they have to type in codes and whatnot with their left hand (as their right hand is busy keeping stuff moving across the scanner).