Switch hitting can’t inherently be a bad thing. Regardless of who the pitcher is, the batter can pick whichever side of the batter’s box he would be better on for the plate appearance. Players generally take the strategy of just hitting from the side opposite the pitcher’s hand. Players want the platoon advantage, but I am not convinced that this is the optimal strategy for each switch hitter.
Tune in to enough baseball games, and you will come across an announcer commenting on how valuable a switch hitter is because you always have the platoon advantage. But isn’t there also value in hitting from your stronger side all the time? No matter how good you are from both sides, you must be at least slightly better at hitting from one side of the plate than you are from the other. Essentially, this is the “there is no such thing as a tie” argument applied to switch hitting.
If your lefty/righty split is close, then switching sides when the pitcher switches hands makes sense. For switch hitters with large lefty/righty splits, then it might be smarter to just hit with your dominant hand the entire time. I went through all switch hitters, both past and present to see which ones would be better off hitting from one side, and how many runs they would add by doing it.
Methodology
The idea is to project how a switch hitter would have done if he had stuck to his better side when he would lose the platoon advantage and compare it to how he did when he just switched sides to preserve the platoon advantage.
For players that showed a preference for the right-hand side, I assumed that their performance as a right-handed batter versus right-handed pitching would be equivalent to their performance as a right-handed batter versus left-handed pitching minus the average righty platoon split. I used weighted on-base average (wOBA) as my performance variable. For switch hitters who are naturally right-handed, I calculated the following: