Giants' Blake Snell proving himself all over again: 'Every year I get better'

WASHINGTON – From one perspective, Blake Snell is solidly middle-aged as a major league player, nine years into a career in which few are lucky to see even half that much time. At 31, he squints back to his draft year of 2011 and his face creases thinking of the time that’s passed.

“I’m old, man,” says Snell, now a San Francisco Giant and surrounded by teammates like baby-faced pitcher Hayden Birdsong, who was just 10 years old when Snell’s pro career began.

From another view, Snell is just getting started.

Oh, his accomplishments are already august enough: Snell is one of just seven players to win a Cy Young Award in both the American and National leagues. He’s pitched in a World Series, been an All-Star, won a pair of ERA titles, is guaranteed more than $110 million in career earnings.

Yet shaking perceptions and trying to forge his own reality has dogged Snell during his decade in the major leagues.

It emerges in the game’s ultimate currency, when the winter after his second Cy Young Award did not yield contract offers befitting a franchise pitcher, forcing Snell to accept a two-year guarantee and a $32 million salary this year from the Giants, essentially an industrywide show-me contract.

And it emerges from the game’s punditry and fans, still viewing Snell through a “five and dive” prism, that he lacks the efficiency to pitch deep into games, that his lingering career image was that of a lefty yanked by manager Kevin Cash, during the decisive Game 6 of the 2020 World Series after 5 ⅓ innings and just 73 pitches.

And it is why Friday night and the four starts that preceded it are so significant.

Snell had never completed eight innings, never seen the ninth, had a big career goose egg in the “CG” column when he climbed the hill against the Cincinnati Reds. He proceeded to throw 114 almost uniformly exquisite pitches and toss a no-hitter, sailing past career markers, etching his name in the game’s lore and concluding one of the most dominant months in recent history.

Since coming off the injured list on July 10, Snell has given up two runs in 44 innings (a 0.55 ERA), striking out 41 against 10 walks. Opponents are batting .078 (8-for-103), lowest average against in a five-start span in the modern era.

Can a guy with two Cy Youngs on his shelf somehow herald the dawning of a newer, better era?

“I feel like every year,” says Snell, “I get better and better. And I feel like my best playing days are definitely in front of me.”

Winter of discontent

To the cynic, this might seem like politicking. Snell’s cruel winter means he can be a free agent again after this season if he opts out of a $30 million player option for 2025; his red-hot five-start run almost ensures that he will.

Should it come to that, Snell won’t be once-bitten, twice-shy.

He harbors no ill will toward agent Scott Boras, who had to navigate a fickle free-agent market for Snell, now-Giants teammate Matt Chapman, Cubs slugger Cody Bellinger and Arizona lefty Jordan Montgomery, who switched agents after the so-called “Boras Four” took short-term deals rather than the nine-figure contracts they’d expected.

Yet Snell is prepared should he again find himself on the market, where his perception might differ a bit from reality.

“There’s things I’m going to do a lot differently if I’m in that position again,” says Snell. “To market myself better so teams can see what they’re investing in. That they know the player they’re getting and how invested I am in baseball.

“I don’t let a lot out. I let out that I like video games and I joke around. But when it comes to baseball, it’s completely different to me. I don’t joke around about it.”

Indeed, Snell’s perception might differ a bit from reality. He’s appeared at times to be chronically online – at one point expressing a remarkable bit of candor on a Twitch stream - though he’s working on it. He says he “got off Twitter for a reason. Twitter’s terrible. It’s terrible.”

Snell’s baseball evidence wasn’t totally unassailable. Even in winning the 2023 NL Cy Young, he led the majors with 99 walks and 5.8 hits per nine innings. He’d never pitched more than the 180 ⅔ and 180 innings he reached in his Cy Young seasons.

As the winter wore on, the shine seemed to vanish from his accomplishments, and the warts on his resume increased, and Snell’s coping mechanism reached a higher level.

“I can’t change what happened, so it doesn’t bother me,” says Snell, who did not sign with the Giants until March 18, delaying the start of his season and leading in part to two stints on the injured list. “There’s moments you want to compare (contracts) and say, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ The only thing that matters in that moment is myself, so why would I compare? ‘Oh, why am I not getting this?’ That didn’t matter.

“Early on, I had that mindset. And then as it was going on, a lot calmer. I’ll go where I’m supposed to go. A team that sees my value is going to get it. I made it personal and it’s way better that way.”

The next winter is shaping up to be way better, too.

Big Unit parallels?

Bryan Price has seen some things.

The San Francisco Giants pitching coach has spent nearly a quarter-century in the big leagues in that gig or as manager, and can recount plenty of glorious pitching runs.

He is hard-pressed to compare anything to the way the ball is jumping out of Snell’s left hand right now – a 98 mph fastball that eats up hitters, or Snell’s signature curveball that he’s throwing at a higher rate – 26.1% – than at any time in his career.

“It’s not just elite because the velocity or the way it spins on the breaking ball,” says Price, who joined longtime partner Bob Melvin in their first year in San Francisco. “It’s just how crisp and executed it’s going the last four or five times out.

“It’s to the point where when he goes out there you think, if he’s in the zone crisp, it’s not that much of a surprise that you have seven scoreless innings. Or a complete-game shutout.

“Or potentially, a no-hitter. Because his stuff is so good.”

Price casually throws out another name – Randy Johnson – in the Snell conversation, not necessarily to compare the Giant’s stuff to the 6-foot-10 Hall of Famer.

No, it’s more about career arc, how Snell was never, Price says, “a command-and-control” guy. Yet he suggests we may be witnessing a great pitcher blooming, later, into an even better and more effective weapon.

Sure enough, Johnson’s age-31 year in 1995 was perhaps his last massive leap, winning his first Cy Young and striking out 294 batters while posting career-bests in ERA (2.48) and WHIP (1.05).

“And now Blake is in this period of time, doing some of the things Randy Johnson did when he really figured out in Seattle and Houston and Arizona – the combination of unbelievable stuff with elite command,” says Price.

“If Blake maintains that, he’ll pitch another 10 years at the top of the business.”

It has been a winding route, to get body, mind and emotions on the same plane. Snell was devastated when the Rays traded him to San Diego, not three months after the World Series disappointment and just two years into a five-year, $50 million deal that he felt exhibited a commitment to Tampa Bay.

He admittedly came to San Diego and “didn’t know how to handle it,” he says, “just trying to be what I felt was accepted for that team. I’d never been on a new team.

“When I came here, I didn’t really care to be accepted. I was just going to be myself. I was very confident in who I am. When I went to San Diego, I was more focused on fitting in.”

A pair of injury-stalled seasons pitching to a 3.79 ERA ensued, and even as Snell put up a Cy Young platform season in ’23, the Padres’ high hopes diminished in an 82-win season. Melvin left for the Giants.

Snell and Chapman, free agent vagabonds, soon joined him, for lack of firmer offers. Snell, a Seattle native, may look back on his Bay Area period as a waystation. Perhaps a long-term relationship will germinate.

For now, the growth continues. The happy-go-lucky kid in Tampa Bay now has a 2-month-old son, Kaedyn, and, despite an uncertain winter, more professional conviction that seems to grow with every start.

“There’s a reason why I’ve had the success I’ve had and a reason I’m striving to find a way to get more out of my ability,” he says. “My ninth season: I’ve had so much trial and error and learned and grown and gotten better and better every year.

“I trust it. It’s all from hard work. The belief, the feel, that’s where it all comes from.”

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Giants' Blake Snell proving himself again: 'Every year I get better'