If the saying goes that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, spring training for a White Sox team coming off a 121-loss season might inspire an inverted line of reasoning: If a minor league deal with the White Sox doesn't lead to a real shot, where do you go from there?
The question might haunt the brain of a less experienced, less weathered player through the end of next month. But for 32-year-old Lake Villa native D.J. Snelten, who arrives at Camelback Ranch almost seven years after the only four major league appearances of his life, the intervening time has seen him:
- DFA'd on his birthday
- Released by two separate major league and Mexican teams apiece
- Undergo Tommy John surgery and rehab while not employed by MLB team
- Win Pitcher of the Month during one of two stints with the indie ball Chicago Dogs
- Shift his focus to a post-playing career multiple times, only for what he learned to inform a totally remade delivery and arsenal
And alongside all this turbulence, transformation, pain, failure and torment, the towering left-hander has grown a bit more at peace about the uncertainty that baseball offers to him, and how to look at this spring's chance with the White Sox.
"When you play this game," Snelten said in a phone call, "You roll the dice."
The dice aren't loaded, either. Snelten is not in major league camp. His debut with Giants was so long ago that he doesn't have any overlap with Brian Bannister nor Ethan Katz, as he (and presumably the workout shorts Snelten is wearing in the video below) predated their time in San Francisco. That remade delivery that he showed at a Tread Athletic pro day? It's going to look funky to you.
Guess that Velo. 🤔
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) January 6, 2025
Let's test your Eyedar. pic.twitter.com/zULWvMfuso
"It's a really good [example] of 'find your answer, not everybody's answer,'" Snelten said.
The pitch in this video sails past the catcher's grasp at 100 mph, and Snelten readily concedes that if it didn't, and if he was still the 89-92 mph strike-thrower who cracked the majors with San Francisco all those years ago, his current opportunity wouldn't be present.
So there's a surface-level irony in all the derisive Twitter comments of "Ball 1" in response, and a deeper one in that Snelten -- released from the Yankees Triple-A affiliate in 2023 because he walked over 10 batters per nine innings while sitting in the high-90s -- reached the moment of clarity that his newfound power needed to be harnessed a while ago, and this deeply personalized delivery is the result.
"I'm 6-foot-7, 265 [pounds], and I'm pretty rotationally consistent nowadays and have learned how to get into my back hip," Snelten explained. "[I have] what we call back hip internal rotation bias. I kind of always wanted to torque inward. When you watch video of me throwing in 2018 -- I can't watch it personally because it's hard for me to watch that -- you would see how hard my back leg would cave in. I learned the only way I'd be able to hold that back hip where it needed to be was by almost coiling against it and then holding that for as long as I could in my delivery.
"It turned into this borderline corkscrew movement. I didn't realize it would be the signature it is now. Because I'll go and throw at another facility or at a local college, and after maybe five or six throws, somebody will go, 'Oh, I recognize you from Instagram.' And I'm like: I'll take it. If it's not [because of] my brilliant career but Instagram, I'm totally OK with that."
Despite his massive frame, the idea that there was extra velocity in the tank -- or all the body movement terminology he just dropped in that quote -- were foreign concepts to Snelten in 2019. Released by the Orioles after a spring where the disinterest in what he had to offer was palpable (he pitched a third of a Grapefruit League inning), Snelten prepared for his next stage in life. He returned to the University of Minnesota to finish his sports management degree. It's just that he never planned on leaving baseball. With his brother running a training facility named Prime Athletics in Grayslake -- where Snelten would rehab from TJ in 2021 when one team MLB was nice enough to inform him that his badly damaged UCL was muting the interest in his services -- he figured his next life would be in coaching young pitchers.
There was just one hurdle.
"If I'm going to teach people how to do this, I should probably learn how to do this," Snelten said.
Like any American under 40, such a pursuit brought Snelten to the internet, watching videos demonstrating grips or even just medicine ball drills, absorbing Pitching Twitter. Thirsty for insight from people who seemed like they knew what they were talking about, Snelten found himself DM-ing video of his delivery to Nick Sanzeri, currently the pitching coach at Ohlane College, who regularly posted instructional videos at the time. The deeply critical response he received sparked a long-term friendship, put Snelten the road to becoming someone who knows what sorts of rotational biases his hips hold. And for someone whose playing career had seemingly petered out in unsatisfying fashion, it was the sort of blunt feedback for which Snelten didn't realize he had been longing.
"Dude, you're terrible with your legs. If you learn how to even use them, you would throw a would throw 100 mph."
"'You should be throwing upper 90s'" Snelten recalled Sanzeri explaining, "When somebody tells you that, you just desperately want to believe. I decided, you know what, I've never really bought into anything before in terms of someone else's process, and maybe it was time to try something new."
Within weeks of working together, Snelten and Sanzeri were seeing upper-90s reading on his fastball, removing a lot of what he had previous learned in the process. Snelten had been taught to stay "tall and fall" with his delivery, emphasizing maintaining a steep angle to the plate rather than driving forward, or leaning into any of the rotational movement Snelten does in spades now. Everything was about setting up his changeup, getting the opposing hitter on the front foot. It generated strikes and weak contact until the majors, where the contact it produced wasn't weak by any stretch.
After spending the 2020 season at the alternate site of the pennant-winning Rays, that Snelten would need TJ the following spring surprised him for three reasons: Dr. Brian Cole told him it was accumulated damage from chronic use, rather than a single blowout incident, Snelten was still sitting 98 mph at the time while trying out for teams, and with his legs working to take stress off his arm, throwing had never felt easier.
But if the lesson of Snelten's life in baseball was that the old school methodologies he came up under were wrong, and using data and high-speed video to squeeze every last ounce of velocity from his body -- which he also remade into a more muscled-up version of the same size -- then his story would have resolved itself sooner. Managing his own TJ rehab had a way of making Snelten more detailed-oriented than getting told where and when to throw everyday. Between that and his accumulated knowledge of pitching, Snelten has a remote training business he regards as pretty successful; sort of the family business at this point. But as much as he's old enough to understand all the things he was doing without intent early in his career, he's young enough to realize he's yet to pull together the new capabilities he's developed.
"Sometimes you get lost for a while, when you get so hyper-focused on the training side of things and the metric performance side of things, that we forget what performance actually matters," Snelten said. "Which is getting outs."
Snelten describes his time with the Yankees in 2023 as preoccupied with velocity, stuff outputs, and too detached to the reality that he was walking the park. His subsequent second tour with the Dogs was a tonic of sorts. They simply didn't have enough pitch data to occupy Snelten's focus, and he spent his time establishing cues for actually staying in the strike zone (as much as he's fallen in love with his heater, it's repeating his slider that gets him sync). All those mental skills books he read early in his career before he dove into his mechanics, the visualization exercises preached by the late Todd Oakes, his pitching coach at Minnesota, didn't seem ancillary anymore.
Pitching in Mexico last year was "an incredible experience," for Snelten, checking off a lifelong wish to pitch internationally and exposing him to the finest al pastor the state of Oaxaca has to offer. But at the end of two, short, walk-filled stints for two different clubs, Snelten once again reached the point of feeling something had to change this offseason. He was already friendly with Ben Brewster of Tread Athletics, the pitching training facility popularized by Cole Ragans, Mitch Keller -- or more memorably around these parts, former White Sox Declan Cronin -- and decided to dive in fully this winter. Working with his coach at Tread, Paul Hall, Snelten zeroed in on a single consistent fastball shape, harnessing the natural movement on his four-seamer, and felt he got consistent enough to "get my focus back on hitters instead of always trying to feel things."
At the outset of spring, it would be in theme for the season to proclaim that the best work of Snelten's pitching career has yet to come. Left-handers who throw 100 mph for strikes out of the bullpen tend to hang around for more than four appearances, after all. Snelten grew up surrounded by Cubs fans, but always had an appreciation for the work of White Sox lefty Neal Cotts, and that wouldn't be a bad run to replicate at all.
That would be a happy ending, for sure. But Snelten isn't looking at White Sox camp as an approaching cliff. After facing the end of his career multiple times, only to find something more interesting on the other side, he explains his mindset with a story.
"I remember the day I got DFA, it was -- pretty sure it was my birthday, in Sacramento and I had a teammate named Chase D'arnaud, who had been with a lot different organizations," Snelten recalled. "I was freaking out. What's going to happen to me? Where am I going to go? What's going on?
"And he sits me down and we go to dinner and he gives me some advice: 'What's the worst possible thing that could happen to you right now?' He really challenged me to think that way, and I said ,'Well honestly, getting DFA, getting picked up by an organization that doesn't really value for me or care for me and I'm just filling a roster spot for them and I just dwindle and wither away in baseball.'
"He goes, 'All right, will you be OK if that happens?'
'Well, it will really stink.'
'Will life be OK after that?.'
'Yeah.'
'Well, if that's the worst thing you have to worry about right now, just accept the fact that's a possibility and then just go play your best.'"
For Snelten, if the worst thing he has to worry about is trying to get noticed on a team that's already seen things become as bad as they can get, he can live with that. A few weeks before Snelten signed, the White Sox traded for Cam Booser, another 32-year-old left-handed testament to resilience who used a stint with the Chicago Dogs to bounce back into affiliated ball. Whether Snelten will be able to make an impression on the White Sox remains to be seen, but he's in the right place to get a fair shake.
