Blake Snell’s competitive juices get flowing during his one-inning spring debut.
PEORIA, Ariz.
It was the third day of March and Blake Snell was on the mound to get things done.
He went through his pregame warm-up routine, got himself mentally prepared and went out to pitch against an opposing team for the first time in a Padres uniform.
“You haven’t pitched in forever,” he said of the initial spring training outing Wednesday at Peoria Sports Complex. “You haven’t felt that feeling. You’ve been kind of craving it. You’ve been waiting to pitch again. Pitching against my teammates, I don’t get excited for that. It’s like pitching to my brother. I don’t care.
“But once you face another team and you start competing for the same thing, that’s where you want to beat everybody. You want to dominate. And those emotions start to take (shape) when you’re facing another team because it’s a lot more personal.”
So when Snell’s 2-1 curveball bent to what he thought was the edge of the plate and the home plate umpire called ball three, Snell stared in and let him know he’d missed the call.
Snell ended up issuing a one-out walk to Milwaukee’s Daniel Vogelbach before getting Omar Narvaez to checkswing into an inning-ending double play. After his 15pitch day, Snell copped to being a little amped.
It isn’t a new thing. “I don’t know what it is about the first time I have a game in spring that I always want to talk and say whatever,” he said. “I have to clean that up. … I don’t need to talk to the umpire. I don’t need to say how I feel. It doesn’t matter. He called what he called, move on. I know that. I’m still going to fight myself on it and say whatever I have to say. As spring goes on, you’ve got to grow. It’s the only way to evolve and be the complete player you want to be.
“I can’t get mad. I have to understand that’s a ball, that’s what he’s going to call, and that’s a strike, that’s what he’s going to call. Learn the zone off that and work with him. Who wants to work with you when you’re saying, ‘No, that’s a strike?’ They don’t want to work with you. I have to do this every spring. Maybe I should not do it for one spring, but I feel like that would be weird. I’ll keep it rolling and continue to grow off it.”
While the Padres’ previous three starting pitchers this spring went two innings, Snell was scheduled to pitch one. It’s something he did in his initial spring outing on occasion with the Rays.
“One is just like getting everything, you’re seeing it for the first time,” he said. “You’re seeing an actual hitter, you’re feeling the actual emotions. … Going two innings, for me there is no point. I’m going to get the same amount of information out of both. One inning is fine with me. I can learn a lot from that one inning. It is probably going to be the inning I learn the most from this entire season.”
That is likely an allusion to his propensity to throw a lot of pitches in the first inning, something the Padres have made a point of emphasis this spring as part of the aim to have Snell go longer in games than he did with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Snell, the 2018 American League Cy Young winner who was acquired in a December trade that sent coveted pitching prospect Luis Patiño and others to Tampa Bay, struck out former Padres infielder Luis Urias with a 97 mph fastball. He got a couple of misses with his curve as well.
“It was everything you want to see from a first outing,” manager Jayce Tingler said. “… I would say he was pretty charged up to be out there. That’s a good thing.”
Alternate plans
Although Major League Baseball will use alternate sites again at least at the start of 2021, the Padres have not formalized their plans.
The University of San Diego baseball complex was used as an alternate site during last year’s COVID-19 shortened season, with The Diamond in Lake Elsinore — home to the Lake Elsinore Storm — serving as a backup option had students fully returned to campus at any point in 2020. Elsinore would appear likely this year, as USD is playing baseball.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Angels will use San Manuel Stadium, home of their low Single-A affiliate in San Bernardino, as their alternate site, while the Dodgers were considering both their low Single-A affiliate in Rancho Cucamonga and their spring training facilities at Camelback Ranch.
Alternate sites in close proximity to big-league teams’ home ballparks provided both direct oversight of testing and coronavirus protocols and easy access to player pools. The latter were largely made up of MLBready reserves who could join the big-league team via a short drive in the event of a positive test or an injury requiring a roster move.
Because many of those players would be assigned to teams’ most advanced affiliates, the Triple-A season has been pushed back from its April 6 start day to the first week of May, when Double-A and Single-A seasons will start.
The pandemic wiped out the 2020 minor league season altogether, leaving players at alternate sites to play semi-simulated games against each other all summer to stay in shape for potential call-ups.
“The advantage is that … we felt good within the protocols and doing the best we can to protect them against COVID,” Tingler said. “The advantage (was) consistently having our eyes on those guys, so obviously the health and safety was the most important. Them not being able to play games against other teams was a little bit of a struggle, so hopefully this year with the minor league season these guys can get that game action, play against other organizations, other teams and work it out.”