Look to Your Left. Look to Your Right. Same Guy.

For reasons Mulroy can't explain and no longer questions, this sturdy 6-foot, 195-pounder throws righty in baseball, lefty in football and observers for a loop when they witness his unusual yet enviable skill for the first time.

In the spring, a football recruiter from a division I-AA college visited Maret to speak with Coach Mike Engelberg about Mulroy. The college coach mentioned that he was going to stop by Mulroy's baseball game that day. "He'll be throwing right-handed," informed Engelberg, who spent the next 10 minutes scraping the coach's jaw off the floor.

"Is that the same kid who played shortstop?" a rival baseball and football coach, eyeing the Frogs' quarterback, asked a Maret coach last season. "I could have sworn he was a right-hander."

Well, yes, he is in baseball, but. . . .

"There are other coaches in the league who don't even realize it's the same kid," Engelberg said.

So what to make of this ambidextrous, country music-loving, choir-singing, sophisticated-palated, ex-piano-playing, potentially Ivy League-bound, drug- and alcohol-denouncing, three-sport standout from Bethesda, who in football kicks off with his right foot, can punt with either foot and make option pitches with either hand; who shakes, bats, pitches, golfs and waves with his right hand, but writes, eats, shaves, brushes his teeth, shoots baskets, flips coins, rolls dice and throws a Frisbee with his left hand?

"I kind of accepted it a little while ago. Yeah, it's weird, but it's just what I do, and I don't really think about it now," the terminally humble Mulroy said one day last week in the coaches' office after practice. "I can't throw a football right-handed, but I can throw a baseball [with either hand]. So I really don't know how to work it out, to be honest with you. It's just something crazy. I'm going to let it be how it is and not worry about it."

But you do, of course, like being able to do this?

"It's pretty cool," conceded Mulroy, who turns 18 next month and has decided to play college baseball, probably as a catcher, and to bypass offers in football, for which he is being recruited more as an athlete than as a quarterback.

When Mulroy played dodgeball as a kid, he would throw the bigger, heavier balls with his left hand and the smaller, lighter balls with his right. He can wink his right eye but not his left. He tried switch-hitting, but it didn't work out. In Mulroy's third sport, swimming, in which he holds three individual school records in the freestyle, he breathes on only his right side.

Should it come as any surprise that one of Mulroy's favorite movies is "The Prestige," which is about sleight-of-hand magicians?

His parents, Kevin Mulroy and Betty Sun, are right-handed, as is sister Julia, 12. Mulroy's mom chalks up his right-handed baseball tendencies to his learning that way as a toddler. It was years later, as he became interested in other sports, that they discovered he was more of a lefty. "Another parenting mistake," Sun jokes, knowing that her son's baseball stock would be higher if he batted and threw left-handed.