I'm actually wondering if we're not over or under anaylizing it, we just don't have all the data. Like, I don't know how to write queries and such and I'm not even sure what's available in the feed. So yeah, I agree, this isn't an attempt to generalize off of a pitch as some might think--it's an attempt to use an outcome to learn about what happened in a specific instance to inform future generalizations by figuring out what the fuck they are up to, eh?That would be the scenario with the front-door cutter to a LHH, but with a front-door cutter to a RHH, it's kind of the opposite: if it breaks enough, it's a ball that's very difficult to hit, if it doesn't, it's a hittable strike.
Looking at the clip again, I think Vazquez wanted that pitch not so much further inside but further down, which makes sense in terms of the heatmaps -- on the inside edge, Gonzalez hits LHP harder right at the top of the zone than about belt-high. So Price missed up.
And to Patek & dhappy's point, yes, of course we're over-analyzing that one pitch in terms of the outcome. Good hitters hit good pitches as well as bad ones. We're just trying to figure out which of those two things happened here.
That's the fun stuff!
So specifically, I'm wondering this:
Do the teams have data on how each pitcher tends to miss? Like, you mention Price's cutter to RHH. Like, it's possible the team has data they are confident in such that, say, Price tends to miss up with his cutter, whereas he misses left with some other pitch, or in some other situations.
We ran the numbers a few years ago with Buchholz and, while starts are small samples, treating each start as a sample of lots of pitches brings reliable results together much more quickly.
So imagine, like, Price has a heat map for his cutter against LHH that shows likelihood of outcome--a command map, if you will. You wouldn't just pick your spot on a hitter's heat map and try to hit it, you'd overlay the pitcher's command map on to the heat map to figure out which approach has the highest likelihood of success overall within the probabilities of where the pitch is likely to actually end up.