Up Next - Ian Snell takes on the Cubs

The Cubs went for the sweep against Dusty's Reds, but got pounded by Joey Votto's five RBI. They're scoring a lot of runs, outside of today, and host the Pirates starting Friday.

Despite sweeping them in Pittsburgh, the Bucs pose a challenge tomorrow, in the form of Ian Snell. Snell is their ace, and will show you four pitches.



This is derived from Snell's last two home starts, one from 2007, one from 2008.



Plate locations



He really throws that two-seamer for strikes. Well, everything looks good.

Here's a breakdown of pitch outcomes

	B	CS	SS	F	X	HR
CH	3	0	0	4	2	0
F2	12	9	1	5	15	0
F4	31	7	3	11	12	0
SL	27	15	10	6	13	0

	B	CS	SS	F	X	HR
CH	33.3%	0.0%	0.0%	44.4%	22.2%	0.0%
F2	28.6%	21.4%	2.4%	11.9%	35.7%	0.0%
F4	48.4%	10.9%	4.7%	17.2%	18.8%	0.0%
SL	38.0%	21.1%	14.1%	8.5%	18.3%	0.0%

	All	Sw	SwRt	Whiff	B:CS
CH	9	6	66.7%	0.0%	-
F2	42	21	50.0%	4.8%	1.3
F4	64	26	40.6%	11.5%	4.4
SL	71	29	40.8%	34.5%	1.8

The four seamer is thrown up and out of the zone a lot, and he pounds the zone with the two seam fastball. The change is an anomaly, he rarely breaks it out, but the slider looks to be very nasty, indeed.

Using Josh Kalk's tool, here's what he throws on different counts. The numbers below don't distinguish the fastballs from each other, but I'm interested in when he throws the change and slider. For each pitch, you can see the number of that pitch thrown and the percentage thrown in that count.

0-2
FB  17 29%
SL  38 66%
CH   3  5%

1-2
FB  23 32%
SL  47 65%
CH   2  3%

2-2
FB  17 32%
SL  33 62%
CH   3  6%

3-2
FB  14 42%
SL  19 58%
CH   0  0%

0-1
FB  47 41%
SL  58 51%
CH   9  8%

1-1
FB  36 47%
SL  38 49%
CH   3  4%

2-1
FB  28 64%
SL  16 36%
CH   0  0%

3-1
FB  21 84%
SL   3 12%
CH   1  4%

0-0
FB 143 59%
SL  88 36%
CH  11  5%

1-0
FB  58 62%
SL  29 31%
CH   7  7%

2-0
FB  35 90%
SL   4 10%
CH   0  0%

3-0
FB  17 90%
SL   1  5%
CH   1  5%

Once he gets ahead, you get a lot more sliders, that's clear. Hard to tell on the change-up, since he doesn't throw many.