Inside Blake Snell's weird, wild splits
The San Diego Padres thought they were getting an ace when they traded for Blake Snell. Instead, they got a riddle that seems impossible to solve.
Blake Snell is having a season like I’ve never seen before, especially not out of a former Cy Young Award winner.
When Blake is in the right situation, he’s been the ace-level pitcher that the Padres thought they were trading for this offseason. His ERA at Petco Park is still just 2.81 after getting shelled by the Oakland A’s yesterday, his first loss at home this year. It was below 2.00 in the seven starts before yesterday.
For a while, it was enough to look at his home/away splits and predict success/failure off of that. I mean, the difference in the stats is staggering.
The big difference, outside of the number of runs allows, is that Blake seems to walk a lot more guys when pitching away from home. Almost twice as many. Which means he’s facing more guys from the stretch, where he’s less effective.
Remember, the numbers above include yesterday’s horrendous start. The difference in his home/away splits was even larger before then. And right when I was thinking that Snell was going to dominate the A’s because it was a home game, I was made aware of another one of his strange splits:
Well, okay? So, he’s a creature of routine. He hates pitching day games because they’re different and throw off his preparation for the day. That makes some sense.
And he’s pitching in a lot of these NL ballparks for the first time, having played his whole career in the AL before this, so maybe he just doesn’t have a routine down in these new cities?
I’m trying to make sense where there really is none. There’s no reason that a pitcher should be this good under some conditions (night game at home) and this bad under any other conditions. Which leaves just one answer, and it’s the worst one possible for a number of reasons.
The dreaded “head case”
Yup, it’s in his head.
There’s still a good pitcher in there somewhere. That’s the good news. He still has the stuff to strike out MLB-level hitters when he feels right. The rest of this can be fixed, although there’s no guarantee that it will be.
And before you think I’m about to get all sports radio on you, I’m not. This has nothing to do with his hobbies (like Twitch streaming his video game playing) or his girlfriend or his physique or even the bags under his eyes.
My best guess, not knowing Blake or anything more than the average fan, is that Blake started the season trying to find a new comfort zone for the first time in years. Now, even if he’s comfortable, he’s probably painfully aware of his splits.
He heads into road games knowing that he’s been bad on the road. He opens up day games knowing that he’s been bad during the day. And then he starts pitching with fear (walking guys) rather than confidence.
It’s easy for me or some other yokel to say that he just needs to pitch confidently and throw strikes, but it’s often times not that easy. Throwing a fastball in the zone when you think that fastball is going to get pummeled is both a psychological challenge and probably a recipe for disaster. If you think the fastball is going to get hit hard, it probably will.
What’s the solution?
I’m going to start my answer to this question by saying that I have literally zero way of knowing what would work here. But I do have an idea that might be worth trying.
Outside of when Ryan Weathers and Dinelson Lamet were building up their arm strength to go deeper into games, the Padres haven’t really messed around with using openers this season.
Perhaps, just to throw a new wrinkle at Blake Snell that doesn’t have predetermined negative consequences tied to it, the Padres should try it out. Snell has also been at his worst, at least in terms of walks, in the first inning of his starts this season.
Taking someone like Emilio Pagan (or even Dinelson Lamet!) and having them throw that first inning for Snell would give him a chance to build up his confidence facing the second half of the lineup as soon as he comes in the game.
If that doesn’t work, it might just take patience and understanding. Snell is obviously trying his best to figure things out and get on the right track. He could get there but what he might need more than anything else is the knowledge that the team and fans believe in him and appreciate that effort.
The Hail Mary
It would never happen. It would be borderline unprofessional for the Padres to even consider it.
But, because they didn’t want the negative headlines associated with firing a beloved coach that had been with the organization longer than pretty much anyone else, the Padres still have Darren Balsley on the payroll. His official title is something like minor league pitching specialist, and his role is meant to be akin to a guru who shuttles around the country fixing guys who need fixing. I sincerely hope that he’s in Arizona working on MacKenzie Gore right now.
If he’s not fixing Gore and is, instead, sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, I wouldn’t mind seeing Blake Snell becoming his pet project. But that has the potential to really undermine Larry Rothschild, so it probably never happens.
Allow me to restate. The Padres have maybe the best “pitcher fixer” in the history of baseball on their payroll, and they have two top-line pitchers (Gore and Snell) that need fixing right now. I wish that made as much sense in reality as it does on paper.