Pitching Approaches in 0-2 Counts: A 2025 Review

This post briefly covers 0-2 pitches in 2025. To start, let’s all just acknowledge that hitting with an 0-2 count has to be pretty miserable; pitchers have no great incentive to offer anything particularly close and are highly incentivized to expand the zone. There are no great consequences for throwing a waste pitch and checking whether a hitter will bite. Hitters thus have to defend against all manner of pitch type and location in these instances with no remaining margin for error.

In 2025, 39,430 plate appearances ran through an 0-2 count according to FanGraphs and the results are damning: hitters managed just a 3.1% walk rate against a 45.3% strikeout rate. Their cumulative wRC+ was just 25 – that’s what a .170 batting average will get you.

My interest in 0-2 pitches in this instance stems more from the pitcher’s perspective. How close or competitive are their pitches in those cases on average? Going one step further than maybe a Zone% for 0-2 pitches would be pretty illuminating.

To investigate, 2025 regular season data has been pulled for pitchers who threw at least thirty 0-2 pitches. Data was limited in this manner so that one might discern tendencies from pitcher to pitcher given a reasonable sample of pitches. The operative measure here is the distance of any given pitch from “middle-middle” (note that I’ll sometimes refer to middle-middle later as simply “center”), as measured by the distance of any given pitch from the center of the plate and the midpoint between the top and bottom of the zone assigned to any given batter by Baseball Savant. The top and bottom of the zone for any given batter is based on that batter’s height, and is probably pretty decent in quality.

With that, let’s look at some data. Below is a histogram of the qualifying pitch locations’ distance from center.

Generally speaking, this confirms the conventional wisdom that pitchers are throwing all over the place in 0-2 counts, with the exception of down the middle. The most common distance from middle-middle in these cases is nearly 2 full feet (21-24 inches from center). It’s safe to say that in most cases pitchers are working hard to ensure hitters aren’t getting anything great to hit.

While most 0-2 pitches are quite far from the center of the zone, the next point of curiosity here is how individual pitchers treat these situations. To that end, pitch data has been aggregated for each qualifying pitcher so that their individual averages can be assessed.

The chart below illustrates the distribution of qualifying pitchers’ mean pitch distance from center. As an example, Kenley Jansen threw ninety-four 0-2 pitches in 2025; he qualifies for this dataset and the average distance of his pitches from center is just 10.09 inches. Kenley is one of the few pitchers occupying the leftmost column in the histogram below; he represents the extreme for “going right after a hitter” despite being so far ahead in the count.

As you can see, most pitchers are more reticent to go right after hitters than Kenley Jansen. The most typical pitcher’s average 0-2 pitch is 18-21 inches from middle-middle.

As a quick aside, choosing pitchers with 30+ pitches was not accidental. The thought was that with 30+ cases apiece, the distribution of those averages should generally resemble a normal distribution, per the central limit theorem. The histogram above illustrates that this is roughly the case.

Next, a quick look at those pitchers who occupy either extreme end of the distribution above. The table below highlights those pitchers who, on average, wasted no time going after hitters in such an extreme pitcher’s count.

While mean distance has been discussed to this point, data has been sorted by median distance here in order to better address outliers in the form of particularly wild 0-2 pitches. I think the median might better capture a pitcher’s actual strategy in these counts.

By that measure, Ryne Nelson leads the way —by nearly a full inch—in terms of going after hitters in 0-2 counts. Among those 168 pitches, the middle-most pitch distance from center coming from Ryne was just 6 inches off middle-middle. I find this to be mildly shocking. For the pitchers at the top of this list, more often than not in 0-2 counts hitters are being served a strike.

How about those pitchers on the other end of the spectrum?

Those pitchers who are most often trying to make a hitter go fishing on 0-2 are listed above and they differ drastically from the Ryne Nelsons of the world. Framber Valdez, Tommy Nance, and Tyler Glasnow middle-most pitch distances in 0-2 counts are fully more than 3 feet from center, well out of the strike zone. For someone like Tommy Nance, whose BB% in 2025 was just 5.6% (relative to 8.4% league BB%) this was likely by design, in an effort to induce swinging strikes.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, while they generally pitch well out of the zone, qualifying pitchers in 2025 differed widely in how they approach 0-2 offerings. But which approach is better? One way to briefly address that question is to compare outcomes of pitchers’ mean distance from center in 2025 with the corresponding CSW% of those pitches.

Well, taking the above scatterplot as evidence, it appears as though there is essentially no relationship between a pitcher’s mean 0-2 pitch distance from center and their corresponding CSW%. Pitchers who go right after hitters of course are more likely to ambush a hitter and induce some called third strikes, but so too likely suffer in terms of earning swinging strikes. When taken together, it looks like a wash.

As a final visual, the data from that scatterplot has been pulled into the chart below.

While interestingly CSW% tends to be a bit higher for pitchers on either end of the spectrum, those cases are likely in part motivated by smaller samples in those bins. Overall, CSW% is quite consistent across mean distances from center.

To be clear, this analysis leaves a lot unconsidered; pitchers have vastly varied arsenals and strategies in 0-2 counts and comparing their outcomes on the average distance alone omits a ton of context. The data here does not wade into direction from center, i.e. high or low in the zone, or the pitch types employed in these cases, two crucial considerations. Still, it is interesting at a high level to see the varied approach of pitchers.

As far as strategy is concerned, the CSW% rates above to me suggests there is no great reason to go right after hitters in 0-2 counts given that mean CSW% are roughly consistent regardless of how close a pitch is to center. Thus, there seems to be no clear upside to consistently pitching in the zone in those cases while considerable risk looms in potentially gifting a hitter a center cut pitch despite the pitcher’s count. Should a pitch be taken from a ball 3 feet off the plate? Well it’s still just 1-2 and a clear pitcher-friendly state. Still, these differences in approach are part of what makes baseball interesting.