At the plate, switching around is plenty common. On the rubber? That’s a whole different story.

“Right handed, I’m more of a power pitcher,” Brunnig says. “As of now, I’m a fastball pitcher—fastball, slider, forkball or splitter and a little curve. Left handed, I use more movement…[and] try to spot it a little more.”

That singular quirk, switch-pitching, was never meant to be a ticket to a spot on a Division I roster, nor was it a possibility ever explored in-depth by Brunnig, who first learned to throw with his left hand fresh out of t-ball.

Instead, that trait that draws all the attention—making Brunnig probably want to crumple into a ball more than anything—is a product of efforts to ensure he’d do just the opposite.

Worried about his son’s back and the strain that comes with exerting such force with just one arm, John Brunnig insisted that young Matt learn to throw both ways, guaranteeing balance in the development of the muscles on both his right and left sides.

“Then that’d throw off the spine and everything,” Brunnig says. “So he got me throwing left handed.”

Of course, learning to catch and throw is difficult enough for a child to master, even with his dominant arm making the toss. So relearning the mechanics and motion from the opposite side wasn’t exactly easy.

Having his dad, also a right-hander with no experience hurling with his left, take up the task with him made it seem less daunting.

“I was a switch hitter, and he pitched batting practice to me left handed, so I could hit right-handed,” Brunnig says. “It was hard for him, I think. I really didn’t appreciate that, so I didn’t pay attention to how much time he was putting in.”

With his dad’s instruction and the aid of a football, Brunnig worked on getting down the rhythm, using his ability to throw a spiral as an indicator of his progress.

But despite the modicum of success he’d enjoyed, the novelty of switch-pitching wasn’t attractive enough to keep Brunnig from neglecting his newly-learned dexterity.

“I always pitched more right-handed because I…was never as comfortable with it, so I didn’t put as much time in,” he says. “I threw some in high school, I threw a couple games in little league. And only the last couple of years would I say that I’ve been trying to put equal time into left-handed and right-handed.”

Not that he wasn’t busy attending to other aspects of his childhood way back when.

Home-schooled from kindergarten through high school with his younger brother and four sisters, the easygoing Floridian developed extraordinarily strong bonds with his siblings.

“Up until I really started driving,” Brunnig says, “I probably had the closest relationship to people in my family.”