A closer look at Shane Youman

With the Pirates giving me nothing to talk about, I figured I'd take some time to look at players on the roster that don't get as much attention paid to them as others. I have no idea how many of these I'm going to do or if there's even going to be more than one, but I've only been back at school for a week so that means I don't have much else to do at the moment on this dreary holiday afternoon.

Anyways, I wanted to take a closer look at Shane Youman's career in the Pirates organization today. Youman is kind of a mystifying guy for me. He took a rather slow journey through the minors (he made his debut at almost 27 last year), he's a big guy, but he doesn't throw hard, he walks way too many guys for a finesse pitcher, and yet his minor league record was 33-13. Still, I saw him pitch a bit last year in Pittsburgh and wasn't that impressed at all by him. He finished up his 21 and 2/3 innings in Pittsburgh last year with a 2.91 ERA and a 1.21 WHIP, but his peripherals (namely his four walks per nine innings and his two strikeouts per nine) were terrible, granting the small sample size.

We kicked into the off-season and I didn't think much about Youman, but recently something about him has grabbed my eye. That thing is his projections for 2007. ZiPS puts him at a 4.77 ERA and a 1.44 WHIP. It's nothing special, but it's certainly acceptable for a fifth starter and it's much better than what they project either Sean Burnett or Shawn Chacon for. Over the weekend The Hardball Times released their Marcel Projections for 2007. They're a bit more unwieldy to navigate than the ZiPS, but if you look here and do a Ctrl+F for his name, you'll find that they have Youman down for a 4.06 ERA and a 1.33 WHIP (though granted, they're projecting his usage as a reliever and not as a starter).

Naturally, this intrigues me. Youman doesn't have nearly enough time in the bigs to garner a Baseball Reference comparable player and he didn't even show up in BP 2006 for a PECOTA comp, while the 2007 edition won't be out for a month for me to check. The strange thing about those projections is that ZiPS projects him to have a rather sad 1.43 K/BB ratio and Marcel is about the same at 1.65. So what is it about Youman? Why is he projecting out as a rather average or maybe even slightly above average pitcher this year? How has he managed such a good record in the minors? The answer surprised me; Shane Youman is actually kind of hard to hit. In his minor league career, he averaged 8.03 H/9 innings. Zach Duke averaged 7.55/9 in his minor league career, Ian Snell averaged an identical 8.03/9, Paul Maholm averaged 8.45/9, and Tom Gorzelanny came in with 7.08/9.

Granted, Youman's minor league K/BB ratio is worse than the other four (and it would be much worse if we take away his first two minor league seasons in which he was actually somewhat of a strikeout pitcher) and because of that his ceiling isn't incredibly high, but Youman might actually be a serviceable back end of the rotation guy for a team that can put a good defense behind him. His successful September in Pittsburgh can at least partially be explained by the Pirates surprisingly good defense in that month (Wilbur Miller looks at the Pirates defense across the whole season here and it's definitely worth a read). I suppose the question is, "When the other options are Chacon and Burnett, why not Youman?"