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Sausage: 0-2 Slices

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:

Zones_medium

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.

Wandyrodriguez_medium

Wandy works the inner half a lot

Timwakefield_medium

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

Marianorivera_medium

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

Gregmaddux_medium

Not Magic Wandy, The Professor stays away.

Ervinsantana_medium

Santana works more inside relative to outside than anyone else.

Dustinmoseley_medium

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

Hustonstreet_medium

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