In a pitching department that has prioritized two things — strikes and sinkers — Snell is a novel subject.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Stashed away somewhere in his parents’ house, Kyle Harrison has a keepsake it might be time to unearth.
One day in 2018, when he was still a rising star at De La Salle, Harrison made the pilgrimage to Oracle Park. One of his favorite pitchers was in town. It was Blake Snell, another overpowering lefty then in the middle of his first Cy Young campaign who gave a teenaged Harrison a blueprint for his eventual path to the major leagues.
“I met him and he signed something to me, ‘From one lefty to another,’” Harrison recalled after learning the Giants had inked Snell to a two-year, $62 million free-agent deal. “He probably wouldn’t remember me. We’ll see. I’ll bring it up. I still have the autograph.”
It’s not hard to see the similarities between Snell, 31, and Harrison, 23. Just as easily as they pitch themselves into trouble, they have proven — Snell in the majors and Harrison on his pathway there — to be able to pitch themselves out of it. The heaters coming out of their left arms are so electric, their breaking balls so bendy, that it seems sometimes like even they don’t know where it is going.
In a pitching department that has prioritized two things — strikes and sinkers — Snell is a novel subject.
On his way to winning his second Cy Young award last season, he led the National League in walks. He issued 99 free passes, eight more than the next-closest pitcher, who finished the year with a 5.43 ERA. Snell’s baserunners, however, didn’t come around to score.
“He stranded runners at a rate that was borderline spectacular,” said Bob Melvin, who had a front-row seat from the dugout. “Guys on third, less than two outs, it felt like it was a punchout every time.”
Snell’s 2.25 ERA led the NL, the first pitcher to ever lead a league in both categories. He stranded 86.7% of the runners he put on base, six percentage points better than the next-closest pitcher, Gerrit Cole, the Cy Young winner in the American League.
Logan Webb was the runner-up to Snell in the NL, but the results might have been different if he swapped his 73.7% strand rate with Snell’s. Whereas Webb generated ground balls at a higher rate than any other pitcher, Snell trailed only Spencer Strider with a 31.5% strikeout rate.
“It seems like even if he’s in a jam, I feel like I’ve seen him have bases loaded and he’ll strike out the next three guys,” Webb said, before his voice trailed off into a chuckle. “It looks almost easy, but …”
Rotation partner Alex Cobb, another sinkerballer pitch-to-contact type, picked up the thought.
“You can watch him throw one time and realize that is different than anybody else that throws a baseball,” said Cobb, who saw Snell at a young age as teammates in Tampa in 2016 and ’17. “You knew he was going to have challenges because his arm is so electric and his stuff is so big and so good and with that comes the challenge to keep the ball over the plate.
“The first year he came up we always talked about working deep into games. He knows that’s something he wants to do. The stuff that he has creates a lot of pitches.”
If there has been a knock on Snell, it has been his inability to pitch past the sixth inning consistently. Throwing 180 innings last season, 36 fewer than Webb, the major-league leader, Snell had as many starts of fewer than five innings (three) as he did more than six.
It has been a career-long battle for Snell, who has completed seven innings just 23 times in 191 career starts and only thrown a pitch in the eighth inning on five occasions. That is because, Cobb explained, it is inherent to Snell’s style of pitching as a “rise ball guy.”
“Me and Webby throw sinkers and try to be down in the zone and that results in ground balls. Theirs results in foul balls,” Cobb said. “It raises the pitch count up. And he’s aware of that. He’s found ways to obviously overcome that and be the best pitcher in baseball.”
Snell’s four-seam fastball gets on hitters at an average speed of 95.5 mph, but what makes it exceptional is its movement profile. While the forces of gravity give even the straightest pitches a little sink, Snell’s heater is less prone to that pull than most, averaging only 11.6 inches of vertical drop, or about 1.9 less than average, giving Snell’s fastball the seventh-most “rise” of any starting pitcher last season.
For comparison, Carlos Rodón’s four-seamer has 1 inch of “rise” above average, while Harrison’s has about a half-inch of extra sink.
Last season, Snell relied less on the fastball-slider combination that had been his bread-and-butter, incorporating his changeup and curveball more, which had the effect of mimicking his pitch mix from his 2018 Cy Young season.
Snell’s fastball usage dropped from 55.5% in 2022 to 48.6% in 2023 and his slider from 24.3% to 13.1%. His changeup, which accounted for only 5% of his pitches in 2022, jumped to 18.4% and his curveball from 15.1% to 19.8%.
In the strike zone or not, it was the most unhittable arsenal in the majors.
Batters hit .181 against him, and even incorporating the walks, had only a .579 OPS.
“He walks some guys, but he didn’t give up any hits,” Melvin said. “It’s just tough to hit him. I don’t want to say effectively wild, but it’s tough to play around with him. It’s up, it’s down. It’s breaking balls, it’s changeups. You never feel like you get a good read on him. Last year, I think he really took it to a new level with the changeup and the curveball, which ended being big pitches for him.”
