The Road to The Show™: Padres’ Snelling

Each week, MiLB.com profiles an elite prospect by chronicling the steps he's taken toward achieving his Major League dream. Here's a look at Padres fourth-ranked prospect Robby Snelling. For more stories about players on The Road to The Show, click here.

With multiple options in front of him coming out of high school, Robby Snelling adjusted his plans twice, sending him down a path that led to the High-A Fort Wayne rotation.

Much of Snelling’s amateur profile was defined by his talents as both a hard-hitting linebacker and an imposing southpaw on the mound. While he’s maintained the gridiron mentality – even noting that he wants to “own the box” against hitters – his first Minor League outings show he’s well-suited for the diamond.

Through 16 starts this year – the first 11 of which came with Single-A Lake Elsinore – Snelling owns an 8-2 record with a 1.91 ERA and 88 strikeouts over 75 ⅓ innings. He’s surrendered fewer than three runs in all but two of his starts, and his ERA ranks second among all Minor League pitchers to complete at least 60 innings.

Snelling’s best pitch is his high-spinning, upper-70s curveball, which gets a lot of swings and misses and was lauded by MLB Pipeline as the best in the 2022 Draft. He pairs the pitch with a mid-90s fastball that can get up to 97 mph. As a high-schooler, he really didn’t need more than those two offerings. But since being drafted, he’s begun to develop a changeup with sinker-like movement.

“The key for me now is learning how to land all my pitches and put them in spots where it’s a pitcher’s pitch and not just throwing it,” Snelling told the East Village Times in May. “I want to get up as high as I can, but being it’s my first season, I’m happy where I’m at right now. Not that I want to be complacent with where I’m at; I want to keep striving to pitch even better than I have this early in the season and keep building off of that.”

Coming out of McQueen High School, the 6-foot-3, 210-pounder was set to play both football and baseball at the University of Arizona. But when coach Jay Johnston left Arizona for Louisiana State, Snelling was ready to follow and commit to baseball full time.

The permanent shift in focus would mean almost entirely retooling his body and workout repertoire. Snelling explained the difference in the lifts to the San Diego Union-Tribune in April: “You’re padding your body for contact and hitting people. When it comes to baseball, you’ve got to loosen up so you’re more whippy. So the two positions I played were kind of butting heads.”

Snelling’s baseball accomplishments in high school showed that a full-time shift might not just take place in college, but at the professional level. He broke a 31-year-old state record set by Shawn Estes with 146 strikeouts in 62 1/3 innings during his senior season last year.

Although he was committed to LSU, those plans changed once again. The Padres selected Snelling with the No. 39 overall pick in the Draft and signed him to a reported $3 million bonus, which was well above slot value.

The organization opted to keep Snelling at the team’s facility in Peoria, Arizona, for the remainder of the 2022 season. During this time, Snelling focused on that aforementioned physical transformation, which gave him a much leaner build, and the implementation of the changeup.

He was younger than all but 10 players in the California League when he made his debut as a 19-year-old for Lake Elsinore in April and was stingy out of the gate for the Storm. Snelling was eased into pro ball with two short starts to open the season – during both of which he went just three innings and didn’t allow a hit.

Snelling was let loose by the end of April and completed exactly five innings in each of his nine starts before being promoted to Fort Wayne at the end of June. He pitched to a 1.77 ERA with 51 strikeouts in 45 ⅔ innings from April to June and held a stretch in which he earned the win in four consecutive decisions.

MLB Pipeline’s No. 76 overall prospect has been similarly effective in the Midwest League, with one tough outing against Lake County dragging down his numbers a bit. He’s completed at least five innings in each of his other four starts and ended July with probably his best outing to date, during which he struck out nine over six scoreless innings.

After making a number of trades to bolster the big league roster, the Padres’ once-elite farm system thinned out significantly. The club’s first step in rebuilding the farm was their pitcher-heavy Draft last year, where they selected hurlers with their first four picks.

Snelling and first-rounder Dylan Lesko were both high school arms that are probably a couple years from the Majors, but they seem to figure heavily into the next core in San Diego.