Robby Snelling - 6/27/23

Snelling was recently promoted to High-A Fort Wayne in just his first year, let's take a look at what he has done so well

Prospect Spotlight 🔦

Robby Snelling SP – Age: 19 – B/T: R/L, 6’3’’ 210 – Padres (High-A)

• Born: 12/19/2003 (Reno, NV)

• Acquired: Draft: CB-A (Padres)

While the top end of the 2022 MLB draft pitching class was rather weak, there was a smorgasbord of interesting arms graded in the Comp A / early second round, and Robby Snelling was one of them. A two-way star, Snelling was committed to play both football and baseball at the University of Arizona, but he later committed to only play baseball at LSU after Jay Johnson left Arizona to take over the LSU program. Sturdily built, Snelling certainly looked like the part of a D1 linebacker, but his baseball talent was too promising to play football. This decision paid off handsomely, as the Padres selected him 39^th overall and paid him a $3 million dollar signing bonus. After being shut down in 2022, Snelling dominated Low-A in 2023, before getting promoted to High-A Fort Wayne just yesterday. Let’s take a look at how Snelling has done this year and how it compares to his prep days.

When scouts came to see Snelling in high school and on the showcase circuit, the first thing that stood out about him was his physicality. Snelling is built like a middle linebacker, checking in at 6’3’’, 210 pounds, without much more room to grow. The other thing scouts would notice was how aggressive his delivery was from the left side. Snelling would fall off aggressively towards the third base line, and combined with significant head whack, indicated potential future command issues. This meant he had to show velocity because it didn’t look like there was more coming, as well as present command to show that he could overcome the violent mechanics and throw enough strikes to be a starter. During the 2021 summer, he met both goals fine, topping out at 97 MPH while sitting in the low 90’s consistently and throwing a fair number of strikes. On the showcase circuit, he was almost a fastball only pitcher, using it 72% of the time, peppering the zone with it (65% strike percentage) and getting a decent number of whiffs with it (28%).

While impressive, Snelling’s fastball wasn’t built like many modern heaters, thrown with rise and at a shallow angle; rather it was more of a tailing fastball thrown from a generic ¾ arm slot. His more impressive pitch, at least from a movement profile, was his curveball, which got plenty of two plane break and flashed plus multiple times. The main issue with the pitch, outside of the typical command issues every high school pitcher has, was that it moved so much that it was easy to see out of the hand. While that didn’t affect him at the high school level (79% whiff%), from a pitch design standpoint it appeared he would have to tweak the pitch to be successful in pro ball. He only threw this pitch ~19% of the time in games. He also mixed in a changeup but didn’t throw it enough to comment on other than it was clearly a work in progress. Heading into the draft, while there wasn’t much in the way of physical projection, there was a fairly high floor, combined with a plus curve and above average fastball, that made teams interested in him early, and which lead to the Padres taking him at the very end of the Comp-A round.