IT’S SNELL’S GAME NOW
Padres pitcher wants to prove that he can go further than six innings and be the man to lead the starting staff
“I don’t want to be the guy that could have been or anything like that. I want to max out my potential.” Blake Snell • Padres starter
Blake Snell quit playing Monopoly. “I get upset,” he said. “I’m just a bad loser.”
When his golf shots aren’t going straight, he gets mad and then he gets quiet.
When he’s playing video games and not doing well, he starts talking trash and never stops.
“I’m getting in your head and making sure you play worse,” he said.
After a couple pitches that missed on Sunday afternoon against the Angels, Snell’s yells may have been almost loud enough to be heard on the other side of the 101 Loop. His two times facing Mike Trout in the game were among the most intense spring training atbats you will see.
“I don’t really take it easy,” Snell said. “It’s very important to me. When I’m out there, I don’t know when my last pitch is going to be so I’m going to make sure every one has intent, purpose and meaning behind it.”
The 28-year-old left-hander has thrown 91⁄3 scoreless innings this spring, allowing four hits and walking three. And after each of his four starts, he has spent considerable time when talking to the media critiquing his performance. He will discuss what he did well and then break down the mechanical adjustments he needs to make, the pitches in certain at-bats that left him frustrated and what he thinks he might do to fix it all. He will even dissect the plays he believes he failed to make in the field.
“A lot of really good players evaluate themselves pretty hard, and they hold themselves to high standards,” Padres manager Jayce Tingler said. “He’s pitched well, but it also speaks to how much better he can be.”
Better. Nah.
“The No. 1 thing is to be the best I can be,” Snell said. “I don’t want to be the guy that could have been or anything like that. I want to max out my potential.”
So, this is not a dude who is OK with ranking 62nd in the major leagues in innings pitched over the past four seasons. Having 36 quality starts since 2017, just 40 percent of the time he has taken the ball to start a game, is not good enough.
“I want to be the guy,” he said Sunday. “I want to go as far as I can go.” Snell won the American League Cy Young award in 2018 and since the start of that season ranks sixth among major league starting pitchers in ERA, sixth in batting average allowed, sixth in strikeout percentage, 13th in WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched) and 13th in FIP (fielding independent pitching).
Yet he did not pitch into the seventh inning in any of his 17 starts last year and did so just twice in 2019. He has never gone more than 71⁄3 innings in any of his 108 career starts and has pitched into the eighth just four times.
Now, the uniform he wore for the first five seasons of his career had
something (a lot) to do with that.
The Tampa Bay Rays allowed their starting pitchers to go three times through the batting order fewer than any other team since 2015.
Just 10 times in the past five seasons has a Rays starter pitched at least 150 innings. The other 29 teams averaged 13 in that span. Most of the seven teams with fewer instances of a pitcher going 150 innings (including the Padres, with nine) are near the bottom of the standings over those five seasons. The Rays’ .511 winning percentage from ’15-19 was ninth best in baseball. They were limiting their starters on purpose.
Count yourself lucky if you find someone who loves you as much as the Rays love relievers.
But there is a little bit of chicken and egg situation with the Rays and Snell too.
After a period of building up his arm, the Padres plan to push Snell — and allow him to push himself — as far as he can go in games.
He has some things to clean up on the way, like being more economical with his pitches and putting away batters earlier.
He throws more pitches in the first inning than the game’s best generally do. He gets to three balls more often and full count more often too. He allows a higher batting average with two strikes than the pitchers to which he is in many ways comparable — Trevor Bauer, Gerrit Cole, Jacob deGrom and Yu Darvish among them. His average of 4.23 pitches per batter ranks 72nd among 73 qualifying starting pitchers since the start of ’18.
He has lamented not ending at-bats quicker this spring and on Sunday said, “Four pitches or less. As long as you go four pitches or less, you’re going to be out there for seven, eight, nine.”
(The difference between Snell’s 4.23 pitches per batter and Jacob deGrom’s 4.01 adds up to more than a pitch per inning and eight or 10 pitches over the course of seven or eight innings.)
Sunday’s game was a vivid — if extreme — illustration of what Snell sometimes battles.
He threw a first-pitch strike to just four of the 15 batters he faced. He went to three balls four times and walked two of those batters. When he was removed with one out in the fourth inning, he had not allowed a run but had thrown 61 pitches.
He’s the kind of competitor, with the kind of pitches, who in the regular season may very well have lasted into the sixth inning without much damage, but it likely would have taken him more than 100 pitches to do so.
To Padres fans, for whom it is not an uncommon occurrence to watch a starting pitcher struggle to get through five innings, that version of Snell might seem like a godsend.
But not for this version of the Padres, who expect to be contending for a World Series title.
And not for Snell.
Not when it’s all a competition — against the batter and against himself. Who is best? And what exactly is best?
Snell’s version of competing is a spiritual experience.
“The best part about trying to understand what the best me is, is I’ll never know,” he said. “It’s just something to chase. Even when I’m at my best, is it the best? I don’t know. I feel like just chasing to be better, chasing to be elite every day, that’s the best part about trying to be the best. Each outing, you get good ones, bad ones, OK ones, but when you get to chase something every day and try to be the best, it’s a great feeling. It’s a fun feeling to love something and try to be the best at it.”
The Rays have had great success handling their pitchers as they have — well, save for how it turned out when manager Kevin Cash removed Snell with one out in the sixth inning in Game 6 of the World Series after he had allowed his second hit of the game.
But if his time with the Padres turns out as Snell intends, it will be true that the Rays caged a lion.
“The biggest thing is finding out what’s inside me,” Snell said. “You can’t find that out going five and six. So being able to go seven, eight, nine and competing with yourself, challenging yourself, it’s a beautiful thing.”