Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?: 2006 in Review- Ian Snell

Now that 2006 is over, I'll be looking at one or two Pirates and their 2006 season each day. I'll look at what we expected, what we got, and what that might mean for the future. I may or may not assign a meaningless grade to their performance. Today: Ian Snell

2005 key stats- 11-3 3.70 ERA, 1.01 WHIP, 104 K, 23 BB in 112 innings at AAA, 1-2/5.14/1.60 with 34 K and 24 BB in 42 innings in Pittsburgh
2006 PECOTA- 6-8/4.61/1.39 with 91 K and 43 BB in 121 and 2/3 innings
2006 key stats- 14-11/4.74/1.46 with 169 K, 74 BB, and 29 HR allowed in 186 innings

And so we get to the righty. He's a little bit more of an enigma than the first two guys we've talked about, I think. Some nights Snell would be dominant, others he'd be exceedingly human. He's got a great fastball and curveball, but lefties absolutely killed him this year. He was also the only pitcher of the three that spent the whole year in the rotation to not make huge strides in the second half (his ERAs were almost identical at 4.74 before and 4.75 after and while his WHIP (1.51 to 1.41) and BAA (.291 to .260) both dropped considerably, he gave up 17 of his 29 homers after the break (in 15 less innings than before the break). His walks also increased in the second half from 3.40/9 to 3.80/9, though his strikeouts increased more dramatically (7.24/9 to 9.28/9). As I've mentioned before, his ERA+ this year is a kind of surprising 95, the same score as Maholm (who he seemed to be much better than). It should be mentioned, of course, that Snell suffered from the same bad defense as Maholm and Duke, his BABIP was .303. Only 3 non-Pirate pitchers had numbers higher than that.

So Snell was better than we expected, but maybe not as good as we thought he was during the season. Now we can throw another wrench into things. Let's look at the Baseball Reference age comps for Snell, Duke, and Maholm (explanation of the similarity scores here, and I know John Franco just mentioned these in the comments and it likely looks like I'm blatantly stealing that idea for my post, but I actually had these laid out during my Duke write-up and was waiting for the Snell post to use them).

Duke:

Danny Jackson (990)
Bob Hendley (986)
Bruce Ruffin (979)

Maholm:

Pete Richert (987)
Cozy Dolan (985)
Lou Brissie (985)

Snell:

Roy Halladay (981)
Jason Schmidt (978)
John Thomson (978)

Talk about having the most favorable comps. Keep in mind that these are the most comparable players at the age the player is currently at. So when it says Ian Snell and Roy Halladay are similar, it means they're similar at age 24. The basic idea is that since so many people have played baseball in the past 110 years, most players will follow a career arc similar to someone that's already played. Still, these things change a lot over time. Through age 26 Tom Glavine was most closely comparable to someone named Britt Burns, today at age 40 he's now closest to Warren Spahn at 40. His top career comps come up as Jack Morris, Tommy John, and Tom Seaver. So I suppose what I'm saying is that while these are fun to look at, it's a bit early for them to mean much for Duke, Maholm, and Snell. Still, Snell established himself as a good strikeout pitcher this year and managed to be more successful than anyone could've imagined when he was fighting for a rotation spot in spring training. It's certainly a lot to build on.

Stats from the Baseball Musings Day by Day Database, Yahoo! Sports, ESPN.com (they're the only ones that list current BABIPs for free), Baseball Reference, and my trusty copy of Baseball Prospectus 2006.