Despicable 3-2

A couple of days ago, my Twitter feed was full of the usual silliness . . . this time about movies with slightly changed titles, when this thought popped in my head:

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I wanna see that animated movie about a grumpy ex-villain with a nasty payoff pitch, “Despicable 3-2” #movies#mlb

That got me wondering if any pitchers were particularly terrific in 3-2 counts in their career. With the Baseball Reference Play Index Pitching Split Finder fired up, I filtered for all pitchers’ performance in a full count since 1988 (when individual pitch data became more readily available).

Sad to say, Karen Matarazzo’s brilliant realization that John Lannan IS Gru didn’t bear fruit in terms of his performance in 3-2 counts. But here are some pitchers whose performance did.

Here are the pitchers with the lowest OPS in 3-2 counts (minimum 1,000 innings pitched in career). Many of the names you would expect (Ryan, Pedro, Maddux ….) and Chris Bosio?:

Here are the best pitchers in terms of SO/BB rate in 3-2 counts (again, minimum 1,000 career innings since 1988). Hey, this Doug Jones was pretty despicable, wasn’t he? And . . . Ervin Santana?

Sadly, B-R doesn’t have K% or BB% (yet), because those would be great measures of 3-2 “despicableness”.

And as for John Lannan, Gru’s doppelganger? Eh . . . not very “despicable 3-2”