San Diego Padres: Predictions, comparisons for Chris Paddack and Dinelson Lamet

Who does Chris Paddack closely resemble?

Fangraphs projects Paddack to follow up his stellar rookie year with a 3.68 ERA in 28 starts. In those starts, they have him registering 174 strikeouts in 159.0 innings to go along with a better K/9 (9.85), HR/9 (1.36). However, they see him walking a few more batters this season and being somewhat unlucky in terms of BABIP (.297) after posting .237 in this category last year.

Paddack profiles similar to a player like Jake Odorizzi. Let’s look at each players’ first full year in the big leagues as well as Odorizzi’s 2019 to gain a sense of what Chris might look like a few years down the road:

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table

A quick review of the table indicates that Paddack allowed a few more home runs in his first season but displayed a better command of his pitches. Still, the strikeout percent (SO%), extra-base hits (XBH), balls hit in play (IP), line drives (LD%), and fly balls on the infield (IF/FB) were all nearly equivalent.

If Paddack were to continue on Odorizzi’s trend, he would see an increase in strikeout percentage, groundballs-to-flyball ratio (GB/FB), and strikeout-to-walk ratio (SO-BB%) and a decrease in home runs, balls hit in play, and a slight decrease in walks. My takeaway from that is Paddack would be a pretty darn good pitcher five or six years from now.