Some thoughts on pitching

While digging through statistics to write up my pitcher's season review, I've kind of stumbled upon something that I can't believe I didn't notice sooner. Let's see if anyone can identify the following splits:

5-2, 3.59, 1.47/3-8, 6.14, 1.77

9-4, 4.19, 1.43/1-11, 4.77, 1.57

7-7, 5.60, 1.53/7-4, 3.94, 1.40

Any takers?

They're the home/away splits for Zach Duke, Paul Maholm, and Ian Snell, respectively, this year. We could go a step further. Maholm and Duke had HR/9 of .85 and .48 at PNC vs. Snell's 1.60 number at home. On the road those numbers Maholm and Duke jumped to 1.12 and .95 while Snell fell to 1.22.

I said it a while back, Charlie has said it recently, and now there are some numbers to back things up, it's foolish to make a pitching trade based on what hand a guy throws with. In fact, left-handed pitching seems to have an advantage at PNC Park. Pirate fans have spent the better part of the last couple months speculating which pitcher Dave Littlefield should deal this offseason and they almost invariably come back to Paul Maholm. I talked a little about this in my Maholm post earlier today, I'd guess it's because people view Maholm as the worst of the "big four" and thus the most expendable. On a superficial level, Maholm didn't have a particularly good year this year. He had a high ERA, a high WHIP, walked a ton of guys, and on and on. I just can't imagine Maholm would fetch much in a trade and I do think he'll be better down the road. Maybe not as good as the other three guys, but better than this year. On the other hand we have Ian Snell. Snell struck out a bunch of guys, won 14 games, and got people to take notice of him. Despite that, his ERA+ says he wasn't any better than Maholm. So you play in a ballpark that favors left-handed pitching, you've got a fairly young right-handed pitcher who may have out-performed his peripherals a bit, and you're looking to make a trade for a good, young bat. I like Snell as much as the next guy, but he might be our best bet at a young "Lefty McThump" and trading him wouldn't be as stupid as people might have you believe.