What Happens When A Pitcher Goes Right Down The Middle?
The other week when I wrote about pitches that come in well out of the zone and what happens with those pitches, some discussion in the comments focused on the opposite – what happens right down the chute? If a pitcher is wasting 0-2 pitches, surely he’s firing down the center on 3-0, and if pitchers sometimes miss wildly outside, they probably miss to the meat of the plate on occasions, too.
There have already been 2,535 pitches thrown in 3-0 counts this season (2,227 if we exclude intentional walks), according to the awesome new HeatMaps here at Fangraphs, and so our knowledge of what happens when pitchers are far behind has a solid base. And thanks to data since 2012, we know why pitches have a strong incentive to fight back from 3-0, even with one strike – there is, obviously, an appreciable drop in expected on-base percentage in a 3-1 count, and there’s little chance the batter swings 3-0, anyway.
| Count | PA | AB | AVG | OBP | SLG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| After 3-0 | 19973 | 7193 | 0.287 | 0.740 | 0.496 |
| After 3-1 | 35990 | 20670 | 0.278 | 0.580 | 0.473 |
| 3-0 | 8806 | 654 | 0.347 | 0.949 | 0.745 |
| *Since 2012 |
There are several interesting results here that we can dive into – batters do sometimes swing, pitchers often miss 3-0, but, sometimes, the pitcher sneaks that freebie by for a chance at salvaging the at bat from 3-1. (One unrelated side-note that I couldn’t shoehorn anywhere else: baserunners are 6-for-6 stealing bases on 3-0 counts this year, surely because the pitcher can’t be bothered with the baserunner since he’ll get second base on a walk, anyway.)
Here’s a scatter plot of all the pitches thrown in 3-0 counts this season by PITCHf/x location, with the strike zone and the “useful pitch zone” we identified previously drawn in, courtesy data from Baseball Savant:
That’s a lot of mess, so here’s a different breakdown, again via the new Heatmaps here at Fangraphs:
That’s a fairly even spread across zones, and it also shows that 68.5 percent of 3-0 pitches land in the strikezone. Despite this striking but not at all counter-intuitive rate, however, here are the results for 3-0 pitches so far this season:
| Pitch Result | % | % (w/o IBB) |
|---|---|---|
| Called Strike | 53.4% | 59.3% |
| Ball | 29.4% | 32.6% |
| Intentional | 9.9% | n/a |
| Swing w Contact | 6.2% | 6.8% |
| Swinging Strike | 1.1% | 1.3% |
Surprisingly, there doesn’t appear to be a strong umpire bias here, though the lack of 100 percent strikes on 3-0 pitches in the zone could be made up for by a larger zone in other instances. Instead, here, 67.4 percent of 3-0 pitches are strikes despite 78 percent of non-intentional pitches showing as in the zone in the heatmap above.
So, given how often 3-0 pitches come across the plate, maybe the green light isn’t a bad idea. Of those 206 occasions (8.1 percent of all 3-0 pitches) on which a batter swung 3-0, here are how the results broke down:
| Pitch Result | # |
|---|---|
| Foul | 82 |
| Out | 58 |
| Swinging Strike | 32 |
| Home Run | 11 |
| Double | 6 |
| RBI Single | 6 |
| Single | 4 |
| RBI Double | 2 |
| RBI Out | 3 |
| Error | 2 |
| — | — |
| To 3-1 | 114 |
| Unproductive | 60 |
| Productive | 32 |
It’s a tough trade-off to navigate, as hitters have rarely (16 percent of 3-0 swings) done something productive but when they have, it’s easy value. Again, look at the slash line from above for at bats ending on a 3-0 pitch – a .745 slugging percentage.
As for those home runs, well, each and every one of them came over the plate and was generally high – all of them were at least 2.2 feet off the ground, and all were within 0.7 inches of the center of home plate. As we discussed off the top, there’s plenty interesting about pitches right down the heart, so let’s turn the focus from what happens on 3-0 pitches to all pitches right down the middle.
Already this season, there have been 11,089 pitches thrown directly down the chute (pitches classified as “Zone 5” by Baseball Savant). Have a look:
Oh, cool, a plot that’s just a big blob in the center of the plate. Useful, right? While our heatmaps use slightly different zone dimensions (the data that follows uses Savant pitch data), they, too, show an obscene amount of pitches straight down the middle.
Obviously, with this many pitches already, there’s plenty we can look at. Such as, when do pitchers tend to groove pitches straight down the middle?
| Count | # |
|---|---|
| 00 | 29.0% |
| 01 | 11.0% |
| 02 | 3.3% |
| 10 | 12.0% |
| 11 | 10.3% |
| 12 | 6.4% |
| 20 | 4.4% |
| 21 | 5.9% |
| 22 | 7.1% |
| 30 | 1.8% |
| 31 | 2.9% |
| 32 | 5.9% |
This is somewhat surprising. There have been 60,292 plate appearances so far this season and 3,715 of them have started off with a first pitch that is either a mistake or a goods-on-the-table challenge pitch. That’s a shade over 6.1 percent of plate appearances. Are pitchers crazy?
Well, not necessarily. A good deal of hitters will still take these offerings for an 0-1 start to the at bat, four lucky souls actually got balls called on these pitches, and a fair number of swings don’t produce negative results. However…
| pitch_result | # | % |
|---|---|---|
| Called Strike | 1923 | 51.8% |
| Swinging Strike | 183 | 4.9% |
| Foul | 746 | 20.1% |
| Ball | 4 | 0.1% |
| Out | 503 | 13.5% |
| Hit/Runs | 356 | 9.6% |
| — | — | |
| Single | 180 | 50.6% |
| Double | 72 | 20.2% |
| Triple | 11 | 3.1% |
| Home Run | 50 | 14.0% |
| Other | 43 | 12.1% |
50 first-pitch home runs on pitches right down the middle already this season. That’s small in percentage terms – just 1.35 percent of 0-0 pitches thrown down the middle and 3.49 percent of all home runs this season – but it’s an obvious risk. Someone may want to alert Wade Miley, who leads the league by having served up three of these meatballs for home runs (Drew Hutchison, Tanner Roark, Jenrry Mejia and Shelby Miller are the only other players to have done it twice).
Beyond just 0-0 counts, it seems a pitch down the middle is exceptionally risky. Here’s how pitches in Zone 5 compare to all other pitches in any count:
| Zone | # Pitches | HRs | HR% | xBH% | Hit% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12801 | 260 | 2.03% | 5.18% | 14.03% |
| All other | 219217 | 1171 | 0.53% | 1.74% | 5.36% |
Obviously, treading down the middle of the plate is an enormous risk. This isn’t news, but the degree to which it’s risky is striking.
Some pitchers can get away with this, it seems – Max Scherzer, for example, has thrown 85 pitches down the middle this season, second in the majors, and not a single one has been taken for a ride…or even cashed in a run (in fact, only seven have gone for hits, compared to 10 swinging strikes; for context, 7.33 percent of pitches down the plate are swung on and missed, so Scherzer is nearly doubling that rate).
The table below shows the rate of pitches in the middle of the plate and the swinging strike and home run rates for those pitches for the league’s 101 qualified pitchers. Shelby Miller, get it together, man.
| Name | Pitches | Middle | Middle% | Mid SwStr | Mid SwStr% | Mid HR | Mid HR% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jered Weaver | 1073 | 50 | 4.66% | 11 | 22.00% | 1 | 2.00% |
| Chris Tillman | 1115 | 59 | 5.29% | 11 | 18.64% | 1 | 1.69% |
| R.A. Dickey | 1151 | 80 | 6.95% | 14 | 17.50% | 0.00% | |
| Edwin Jackson | 1061 | 68 | 6.41% | 10 | 14.71% | 0.00% | |
| Drew Hutchison | 1050 | 54 | 5.14% | 7 | 12.96% | 2 | 3.70% |
| Marco Estrada | 1012 | 47 | 4.64% | 6 | 12.77% | 2 | 4.26% |
| Tyson Ross | 1085 | 48 | 4.42% | 6 | 12.50% | 1 | 2.08% |
| Ryan Vogelsong | 945 | 32 | 3.39% | 4 | 12.50% | 0.00% | |
| Alfredo Simon | 900 | 65 | 7.22% | 8 | 12.31% | 2 | 3.08% |
| Lance Lynn | 1157 | 58 | 5.01% | 7 | 12.07% | 0.00% | |
| Max Scherzer | 1199 | 85 | 7.09% | 10 | 11.76% | 0.00% | |
| Yordano Ventura | 974 | 69 | 7.08% | 8 | 11.59% | 0.00% | |
| Nathan Eovaldi | 1109 | 70 | 6.31% | 8 | 11.43% | 1 | 1.43% |
| Tanner Roark | 939 | 55 | 5.86% | 6 | 10.91% | 4 | 7.27% |
| Jordan Zimmermann | 955 | 76 | 7.96% | 8 | 10.53% | 1 | 1.32% |
| Michael Wacha | 1035 | 68 | 6.57% | 7 | 10.29% | 2 | 2.94% |
| David Price | 1186 | 78 | 6.58% | 8 | 10.26% | 0.00% | |
| Roenis Elias | 1070 | 49 | 4.58% | 5 | 10.20% | 0.00% | |
| Homer Bailey | 1099 | 70 | 6.37% | 7 | 10.00% | 3 | 4.29% |
| Jeff Samardzija | 1133 | 72 | 6.35% | 7 | 9.72% | 1 | 1.39% |
| Zack Wheeler | 1003 | 62 | 6.18% | 6 | 9.68% | 1 | 1.61% |
| Julio Teheran | 1077 | 42 | 3.90% | 4 | 9.52% | 2 | 4.76% |
| John Danks | 1074 | 53 | 4.93% | 5 | 9.43% | 1 | 1.89% |
| Jon Lester | 1210 | 64 | 5.29% | 6 | 9.38% | 2 | 3.13% |
| Wily Peralta | 984 | 54 | 5.49% | 5 | 9.26% | 2 | 3.70% |
| Yu Darvish | 960 | 54 | 5.63% | 5 | 9.26% | 1 | 1.85% |
| Jason Vargas | 1134 | 44 | 3.88% | 4 | 9.09% | 2 | 4.55% |
| Tyler Skaggs | 943 | 66 | 7.00% | 6 | 9.09% | 1 | 1.52% |
| Zack Greinke | 1091 | 44 | 4.03% | 4 | 9.09% | 0.00% | |
| Shelby Miller | 1018 | 89 | 8.74% | 8 | 8.99% | 5 | 5.62% |
| Justin Verlander | 1228 | 58 | 4.72% | 5 | 8.62% | 1 | 1.72% |
| Matt Garza | 1064 | 60 | 5.64% | 5 | 8.33% | 1 | 1.67% |
| Tim Hudson | 915 | 48 | 5.25% | 4 | 8.33% | 1 | 2.08% |
| Andrew Cashner | 882 | 48 | 5.44% | 4 | 8.33% | 1 | 2.08% |
| Madison Bumgarner | 1103 | 50 | 4.53% | 4 | 8.00% | 1 | 2.00% |
| Wade Miley | 1193 | 63 | 5.28% | 5 | 7.94% | 4 | 6.35% |
| Ricky Nolasco | 990 | 65 | 6.57% | 5 | 7.69% | 3 | 4.62% |
| Kyle Lohse | 1107 | 65 | 5.87% | 5 | 7.69% | 2 | 3.08% |
| Chris Young | 883 | 52 | 5.89% | 4 | 7.69% | 2 | 3.85% |
| Stephen Strasburg | 1077 | 52 | 4.83% | 4 | 7.69% | 1 | 1.92% |
| A.J. Burnett | 1133 | 52 | 4.59% | 4 | 7.69% | 0.00% | |
| Alex Wood | 894 | 55 | 6.15% | 4 | 7.27% | 0.00% | |
| Jorge de la Rosa | 995 | 55 | 5.53% | 4 | 7.27% | 1 | 1.82% |
| Franklin Morales | 962 | 56 | 5.82% | 4 | 7.14% | 3 | 5.36% |
| Kyle Kendrick | 991 | 56 | 5.65% | 4 | 7.14% | 2 | 3.57% |
| Francisco Liriano | 993 | 28 | 2.82% | 2 | 7.14% | 0.00% | |
| Jarred Cosart | 1048 | 43 | 4.10% | 3 | 6.98% | 1 | 2.33% |
| Tom Koehler | 954 | 59 | 6.18% | 4 | 6.78% | 1 | 1.69% |
| Masahiro Tanaka | 1059 | 45 | 4.25% | 3 | 6.67% | 0.00% | |
| Phil Hughes | 958 | 64 | 6.68% | 4 | 6.25% | 1 | 1.56% |
| Scott Kazmir | 999 | 65 | 6.51% | 4 | 6.15% | 0.00% | |
| Cliff Lee | 1067 | 65 | 6.09% | 4 | 6.15% | 0.00% | |
| Bartolo Colon | 989 | 82 | 8.29% | 5 | 6.10% | 1 | 1.22% |
| Aaron Harang | 1121 | 68 | 6.07% | 4 | 5.88% | 0.00% | |
| Jose Quintana | 1143 | 68 | 5.95% | 4 | 5.88% | 0.00% | |
| Juan Nicasio | 952 | 52 | 5.46% | 3 | 5.77% | 2 | 3.85% |
| Mark Buehrle | 1096 | 53 | 4.84% | 3 | 5.66% | 0.00% | |
| Justin Masterson | 1100 | 54 | 4.91% | 3 | 5.56% | 2 | 3.70% |
| Jeremy Guthrie | 1135 | 57 | 5.02% | 3 | 5.26% | 1 | 1.75% |
| Tommy Milone | 843 | 38 | 4.51% | 2 | 5.26% | 1 | 2.63% |
| Chris Archer | 1086 | 58 | 5.34% | 3 | 5.17% | 1 | 1.72% |
| Johnny Cueto | 1194 | 39 | 3.27% | 2 | 5.13% | 1 | 2.56% |
| Jason Hammel | 1006 | 63 | 6.26% | 3 | 4.76% | 3 | 4.76% |
| Ubaldo Jimenez | 1043 | 42 | 4.03% | 2 | 4.76% | 1 | 2.38% |
| C.J. Wilson | 1277 | 64 | 5.01% | 3 | 4.69% | 1 | 1.56% |
| Brandon McCarthy | 1001 | 65 | 6.49% | 3 | 4.62% | 3 | 4.62% |
| John Lackey | 1124 | 66 | 5.87% | 3 | 4.55% | 0.00% | |
| James Shields | 1169 | 69 | 5.90% | 3 | 4.35% | 2 | 2.90% |
| Hiroki Kuroda | 1059 | 47 | 4.44% | 2 | 4.26% | 4 | 8.51% |
| Travis Wood | 1022 | 72 | 7.05% | 3 | 4.17% | 1 | 1.39% |
| Josh Beckett | 905 | 48 | 5.30% | 2 | 4.17% | 1 | 2.08% |
| Ian Kennedy | 1132 | 75 | 6.63% | 3 | 4.00% | 2 | 2.67% |
| Ervin Santana | 859 | 51 | 5.94% | 2 | 3.92% | 2 | 3.92% |
| Charlie Morton | 1110 | 54 | 4.86% | 2 | 3.70% | 0.00% | |
| Yovani Gallardo | 1087 | 55 | 5.06% | 2 | 3.64% | 2 | 3.64% |
| Mike Leake | 994 | 56 | 5.63% | 2 | 3.57% | 1 | 1.79% |
| Sonny Gray | 1110 | 56 | 5.05% | 2 | 3.57% | 0.00% | |
| Eric Stults | 897 | 30 | 3.34% | 1 | 3.33% | 2 | 6.67% |
| Jon Niese | 983 | 63 | 6.41% | 2 | 3.17% | 1 | 1.59% |
| Gerrit Cole | 1017 | 72 | 7.08% | 2 | 2.78% | 2 | 2.78% |
| Roberto Hernandez | 928 | 39 | 4.20% | 1 | 2.56% | 0.00% | |
| Kyle Gibson | 912 | 39 | 4.28% | 1 | 2.56% | 0.00% | |
| Bronson Arroyo | 882 | 41 | 4.65% | 1 | 2.44% | 0.00% | |
| Dillon Gee | 771 | 44 | 5.71% | 1 | 2.27% | 4 | 9.09% |
| Henderson Alvarez | 948 | 46 | 4.85% | 1 | 2.17% | 0.00% | |
| Garrett Richards | 1024 | 47 | 4.59% | 1 | 2.13% | 1 | 2.13% |
| Rick Porcello | 878 | 49 | 5.58% | 1 | 2.04% | 1 | 2.04% |
| Tim Lincecum | 1078 | 50 | 4.64% | 1 | 2.00% | 2 | 4.00% |
| Edinson Volquez | 918 | 55 | 5.99% | 1 | 1.82% | 2 | 3.64% |
| Felix Hernandez | 1219 | 55 | 4.51% | 1 | 1.82% | 0.00% | |
| Dan Haren | 1027 | 55 | 5.36% | 1 | 1.82% | 0.00% | |
| Jake Peavy | 1023 | 56 | 5.47% | 1 | 1.79% | 2 | 3.57% |
| Adam Wainwright | 1132 | 62 | 5.48% | 1 | 1.61% | 1 | 1.61% |
| Bud Norris | 1036 | 63 | 6.08% | 1 | 1.59% | 1 | 1.59% |
| Corey Kluber | 1097 | 65 | 5.93% | 1 | 1.54% | 0.00% | |
| Wei-Yin Chen | 966 | 69 | 7.14% | 1 | 1.45% | 2 | 2.90% |
| Miguel Gonzalez | 884 | 52 | 5.88% | 0.00% | 3 | 5.77% | |
| Jesse Chavez | 968 | 56 | 5.79% | 0.00% | 1 | 1.79% | |
| Jordan Lyles | 1054 | 54 | 5.12% | 0.00% | 1 | 1.85% | |
| Kevin Correia | 875 | 43 | 4.91% | 0.00% | 1 | 2.33% | |
| Dallas Keuchel | 1037 | 37 | 3.57% | 0.00% | 1 | 2.70% |
Blake Murphy is a freelance sportswriter based out of Toronto. Formerly of the Score, he's the managing editor at Raptors Republic and frequently pops up at Sportsnet, Vice, and around here. Follow him on Twitter @BlakeMurphyODC.
Awesome article. One of my favorites so far this year. Thanks!