If you haven’t been to Baseball-Reference.com, you owe it to yourself as a baseball fan to do it. There are about 4,563,519 different kinds of stats, trivia, and tidbits that you can find on that puppy.

One of the neat things they do is take a Bill James-inspired formula and use it to compare players across eras. Essentially, you can find out which historical or contemporary players are most closely related to each other over the course of their careers or, in the case of active players, at this point in said career.

I was interested in seeing how Scotty Kazmir fares when put under this microscope. He is, after all, the future, and I wanted to see what Hall of Fame pitcher he was most similar to through age 22. The first person he is most favorably compared to is Dontrelle Willis (with a 980 comparison score), which I can understand. Just look at their career numbers to this point, and they are very identical. But I didn’t want to know who from this day-and-age Scott could be compared to. I was looking for a name from baseball’s past. Just below Dontrelle was this name, who got 978 of a possible 1,000 points in comparison …

Vinegar Bend Mizell

To be honest, I couldn’t remember if I had ever heard his name before or not. It sounded familiar, but not so familiar that I recall what he did in the Majors. If Baseball-Reference is right though, this is what Scotty has to look forward to over the course of his career…

9 years: 90-88, 3.85 ERA, 1.38 WHIP, 1.35 K to BB ratio…

Not exactly blowing the doors off of this thing, is he? The ERA is good (but his ERA+ only checks out at 104), and his K/BB rate is astonishingly bad. I understand this by no means says that Kazmir is going to fizzle out and be a non-factor by the time that he is 30. It does mean, however, that early success and talent does not always a successful career make (duh, like no one knew that).

Who do you think Scott most closely favors? What kind of career path do you see him taking? Leave me a comment or shoot me an email to discuss.