What else does Jack Cust do with two strikes?

I got enough requests last time to make my posts fanposts so here we are. Original can be found here.

Continuing the trend from my last post on the A's called strike threes, I originally wanted to do this looking at the whole team. But apparently I need to brush up on my querying and graphing skills first because this took too much time as it was, and that was just for one player! Granted he happens to be the best player, but there's only so much time in a day.

So last time we learned that the A's like to strike out looking a lot relative to most of the league, with Jack Cust leading the pack. But even though it seemed like it happened all the time, Cust doesn't always just sit back and take strike three down the middle when he has two strikes on him. He can also go down hacking too!

OK, so that was a bit of an exaggeration as Cust did a lot of other things with two strikes, including hitting 11 dingers. 2 of these were actually in 0-2 counts. John Lackey and Octavio Dotel, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Hmmm, seems Lackey's was with the Angels up 5-0 in the 9th and the bases empty, so he's excused. But Octavio:

for shame.

But the pie chart only can tell so much. Yes he took about 55% of pitches with two strikes but was that only because they were horrible pitches or was there more to it? Thankfully we have pitch fx data to work with as well. Here's what Cust decided to do with the bat with two strikes:

And before anyone asks, the +'s being swings and the -'s being takes is not my subliminal way of saying that swinging with 2 strikes is better than taking a pitch. I just went with these because they were the smallest shapes that didn't take up too much space on the chart. It's still pretty messy though, and I'm not sure how much it tells us. Cust is pretty good at not swinging at pitches out of the zone, but he is at almost all counts (15.3% swinging at out of zone pitches in 2008 according to Fangrahps, 4th lowest in the majors.)

But Cust did chase at pitches out of the zone still, so what was he swinging at?

(Remember, this is from the umpire/catcher perspective)

Changeups away seem to be a bit of an issue, as are fastballs away. Part of this may also be a product of Cust having to swing at pitches out of the zone he doesn't want to because they're being called strikes, harking back to the last article. He swings at a lot of high fastballs, but he actually made contact with just over half of those. Can't say the same for the bottom part of the strikezone. Cust only was able to put the bat on 1 ball below the strikezone, striking out the other 22 times.

One positive sign is there are few completely ugly looking swings on the chart. I think the changeup low and away is pretty bad looking, and then there's the one ridiculous inside slider that might be an error. Ah, it's so much easier with MLB video when its a starter pitching, much easier to find their strikeouts. Here they are:

So the Felix changeup looks much closer to the plate than the chart shows, it's a damn good pitch regardless. The Santana slider(? that is some insane downward break, curveball like but faster) just owned his soul. Even if he's expecting fastball I'm not sure what his swing is going to do to it, and it looks like Jack didn't have an idea either.

One request that I thought was pretty good was overlaying the balls with two strikes chart over the called strikes one, so here is Cust's:

There's a clear pocket of called strikes/no balls centered at (-1, 2.5). Looking up at Cust's swinging O-Z strike chart there's an empty bit in that area surrounded by a pocket of fastballs he swung at. Notice too all the "balls" in the lower part of the zone, and no low called strikeouts (well just one right on the corner).

So if I was Jack's 2-strike pitch f/x coach, I would tell him to start swinging at pitches away in the middle of the zone as they're gonna be called strikes, and take more offspeed stuff down by the knees since they're being called balls more often and he's not likely to be able to do much damage with them anyway.

Like last time, if you want to mess around with the data I've uploaded my spreadsheet to Editgrid.