SNELL READY TO PITCH, FINALLY
“I thought I was gonna be down for like three days.” Padres left-hander fell behind in spring, then an injury delayed his 2022 debut
Padres pitcher, on his adductor injury in spring training
Blake Snell is ready.
“It’s been a long time,” the Padres left-hander said over the weekend in Atlanta. “A month and a half ago I thought I was gonna be down for like three days. That’s what I remember. I was like, ‘It should be a couple of days. I’ll be good.’ ”
That was April 10. Wednesday against the Phillies, the lefthander will make his season debut.
It might be difficult to understand just how antsy Snell has been without a review of just how his journey here has herked and jerked.
He was itching to be pitching two months ago.
“I never really wanted to pitch as bad as that,” he said. “I mean, I love pitching. I was healthy, and all was good. I did everything in the
offseason. I showed up, and I’m ready.”
He had been through a weird year. He was eager to move on from it, to enjoy what had been built on and off the field.
Snell cherishes comfort. It’s important to him. Being a teammate — getting to know the guys he plays with and them getting to know him — is a priority. Last season, he was on a new team for the first time following a December 2020 trade from Tampa Bay. He wasn’t comfortable. Additionally, he took on the weight of expectations.
It didn’t go well, from the beginning.
“The start sucked,” Snell said the other day.
Most of his pitches were as dastardly as ever. He just wasn’t throwing them where they needed to go. He might have been one of the worst good pitchers ever, or maybe one of the best bad pitchers. He would strike out eight, allow two hits but go only five innings.
“No strikes, walks, everything was 3-2,” Snell recalled. “… The stuff was always there. More, it was just the mental side. I don’t think it was stuff. Stuff keeps getting bet
ter and better.”
When a pitcher is topping out at five innings, it takes just a few bad outings to inflate the numbers. By the end of July, Snell’s ERA was 5.44 and he had gone six innings just three times in 19 starts.
And then things changed.
“You want to know your team,” Snell said. “You want to be comfortable with them and (have) them comfortable with you. It’s very important. As we did that last year, I started to hit my groove and it was like, ‘I feel like I’m part of the team, this is my team.’ The stuff was always there.”
Snell finished 2021 on a heater. In his final seven starts — not counting the one he left after eight pitches with the adductor strain — he allowed a .136/ .211/.252 batting line, posted a 1.85 ERA and struck out 65 batters in 432⁄3 innings. In the final three of those, he allowed four hits over 212⁄3 innings while striking out 31 and walking four.
The month-plus run was by most measures the best seven-start stretch in a career that in 2018 saw him win the American League Cy Young Award.
One of the remarkable things about the seasonending run was he put his change-up “in timeout.” The pitch he threw 20 percent of the time throughout his career couldn’t be controlled, so it was all but scrapped. He did not throw a single changeup in two games. In the other five, he threw it once.
Time to work on it in the offseason allowed the changeup to earn its way back.
“Nasty,” is how Snell has consistently described it since spring training. “…
Which is amazing. I don’t have to go fastball, slider all day.”
So 2022 was going to be different.
Snell had attacked the offseason, he knew where he was going to be and who he was going to be with. He was on track to be ready to go whenever spring training started.
Then, in February, he felt something in his left elbow. He stopped throwing and, as the discomfort persisted, he had an MRI. The results
told him nothing was structurally wrong. He rested and the discomfort went away.
But the layoff had him behind when the lockout ended and spring training began. Where other Padres starters were ready to throw two innings, he was not even throwing off a mound.
He did finally make two spring training starts and was scheduled to start the season’s fourth game. But warming up in the visitors’ bullpen at Chase Field, he felt a familiar twinge in the
muscles that run between the thighs and groin. He didn’t make the start and was shut down with an adductor strain, the same injury that halted his season last September.
While he said what he felt in April wasn’t nearly as severe as last year, the team went slow with his rehab.
“I think that’s like the time I needed, for sure,” Snell said. “But it was so long.”
He returns now to a team with which he is familiar.
“I’m just doing the work,” he said. “I don’t have to talk. Everyone knows me. I know them. I can just like be more quiet, focus on me more. So I like that a lot.”
He also returns to a rotation that is producing in a manner it was expected to do last season. Through 35 games, the Padres lead the major leagues with 18 quality starts.
“We’ll be good with me,” he said. “I’ll dominate.”
Of how he expects his buildup to go, Snell said:
“We’ll keep building. The first one is like get it going. Start by building that confidence. Second one, let’s take off.
“First one, I don’t know how I’m going to feel, don’t know how I’m going to act. I know I can’t wait. I’m excited. I’m ready. Those emotions always, like, the first one gets you going. After that, you’re like, ‘All right.’ I’ll be nasty. I’m looking forward to it.”