Sausage: 0-2 Slices

by Harry Pavlidis on Jan 13, 2009 12:00 AM EST

Sausage is the code word for "sharing my lab notes". Dan broke down pitches by type and location a couple weeks ago, and piqued my curiosity a bit.

I thought the slices and counts could be used, in part, to look at things like "who is the most aggressive pitcher on an 0-2 count?". There can be a few meanings/dimensions of aggressive pitching, but one is plate location. Here's a refresher on the slice concept.

Taking all pitches within the top/bottom of the hitter's zone (based on the average values for each hitter established by PITCHf/x operators), and classifying them by position:

The darker are in the middle is "Fat", the solid areas flanking it are "Sides", then "Edges" (now off the plate) followed by "Off" and "Wide". Fat is 8 inches wide, the rest are 4 inches. Part of "Edges" is actually the last inch of the plate (not shown in the diagram).

From there, I break the non-Fat out as In or Out. I also combine the fat with the inner "side" bit for FatIns. Curious, at the moment, about 0-2 pitches, I picked all pitchers with at least 100 of the in the PITCHf/x database, sorted it a few different ways, and found a few interesting pitchers, all outliers/extremes.

Wandy works the inner half a lot

Wakefield is not flipping you off, he just floats the knuckler over the middle.

Mo will work both sides of the plate, but not the middle - very cool.

Not Magic Wandy, The Professor stays away.

Santana works more inside relative to outside than anyone else.

Dustin Moseley is the anti-Wakefield - never down the pipe.

And, sorry, Huston is a one-way Street.

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Harry, I’m really liking these slices. The Wakefield one in particular is really cool because it backs up what we see when he pitches. Any chance you could do one of these of Tim Lincecum? I’d really like to see that.

Bay City Ball | Beyond the Box Score

by xanthan on Jan 13, 2009 8:49 AM EST reply actions

Cool stuff. Love the Wakefield graph.

Some ideas:

Look at pitchers’ locations against lefties versus righties.
Look at pitchers’ locations with different pitches, again maybe divide up lefty/righty hitters.
Combine with some sort of scouting report (i.e. we “know” Johan and others have great change-ups) and see how good/bad pitchers locate differently.
Look at swinging strike rates for different locations.
Look at swinging strike rates for different pitches.
Compare swinging strike rates for different pitches/locations on 0-2 counts and other counts. I imagine out-of-zone sliders are much more effective on 0-2 and 1-2 than 2-0.
Come up with a way of finding pitchers that are being “inefficient”. With whatever rules of thumb regarding strategy you come up with via investigations like those listed above, find pitchers that AREN’T following the model’s best approach.

Some of those obviously need more definition.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on Jan 13, 2009 10:11 AM EST reply actions

This is fantastic.

I think this speaks highly of Maddux’s control as well, being able to hit the edge more than not.

by R.J. Anderson on Jan 13, 2009 11:34 AM EST reply actions

This is great stuff

Would you guesstimate that Wandy pitches like that because he throws a small percentage of change-ups? I’m thinking of a guy like Glavine who seemed to live on the outside becaue he didn’t have a breaking ball like Wandy’s.

There seems to be a rather large groundswell for Wandy in mock drafts so far this off-season.

What's on my mind

by Jason Collette on Jan 13, 2009 11:39 AM EST reply actions

Lots of good questions

I’ll get back to this later on tonight.

by Harry Pavlidis on Jan 13, 2009 2:00 PM EST reply actions

Tim Lincecum

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/57641/thefreak.PNG
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/57647/thefreak2.PNG

by Harry Pavlidis on Jan 13, 2009 3:42 PM EST reply actions

Much appreciated, Harry. That’s pretty slick and a testament to Lincecum’s stuff, he’s throwing most of his pitches in the fat zone.

Bay City Ball | Beyond the Box Score

by xanthan on Jan 13, 2009 4:34 PM EST up reply actions

Sweet.

Changeups away, who woulda thunk it?

Sliders down the middle a lot, huh? Does that mean he’s back-dooring it? I would have thought many more sliders would be off the outside (at least to righties) and considering his fastball’s down the middle.

There’s just so many ways to slice and dice all this stuff. I love it. Thanks.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on Jan 13, 2009 4:46 PM EST up reply actions