Ah! Well. Nevertheless…
2024 stats: 20 GS, 5-3, 3.12 ERA (2.43 FIP), 104 IP, 145 K, 44 BB, 1.05 WHIP, 3.1 fWAR
Look, we’ll always have that no hitter. Well… actually, he will always have that no hitter. San Francisco Giants fans won’t even really have that final three months of dominance, as the team didn’t even make the postseason; but also, because Blake Snell, mercenary season that he had in 2024, will be a Los Angeles Dodger in 2025 and beyond.
And so it doesn’t feel worth digging too much into the season he had for our favorite team, because well, he’s a Dodger now. He even cast aspersions on the Giants on his way out the door, too.
“Go Dodgers,” Snell responded with a blue heart. “Be upset with your team. Don’t hate when you don’t know anything other than where I signed.”
The Giants were said to have been unhappy with him deciding not to pitch the final day of the season, but it also seemed clear that they knew before then that he would not be returning to the team in 2025. They were likely uninterested in signing him to any sort of extension and they perhaps were aggrieved by his performance to start the season.
It was a bad marriage, and even if I want to be generous and say that the Giants — a team that’s had 1 winning season in its last 8 — do actually know what a good player and a good team looks like, it doesn’t seem like they thought Blake Snell was a very good pitcher at any point in his tenure, save the trade deadline, when they didn’t move him for some reason.
Now, they have a lot of evidence to support this belief. Despite two Cy Youngs, he rarely pitches over 128 innings in a season. His Spring Training lasted until July, and in his first three months of the season (6 starts), he had a 9.51 ERA in 23.2 innings pitched, a pair of IL stints, and a trip to the paternity list. Sure, Blake Snell’s late start wasn’t totally because of his agent, Scott Boras, but this is a Giants blog and so we’ll be a little biased here… even if the Giants fired the dude who made the original deal.
Snell returned from the IL in July and over his final 14 starts he went 5-0, the Giants were 12-2 and in 80.1 innings pitched, he threw a no-hitter, struck out 114, walked 30, and had a 1.23 ERA (1.77 FIP). He looked like the dominant ace who won the Cy Young in 2023. He showed a flash of dominance on the mound that the Giants hadn’t seen from one of their own in quite a while (with all due respect to the impressive Logan Webb).
In spite of his historically awful — and publicly embarrassing — start to the season, he was so dominant in basically the second half of the season that he still hit his projections. Before the season, ZiPS projected a 3.37 ERA (3.70 FIP) with 29.7% strikeout rate and 11.5% walk rate in 161 innings, good enough for 3.2 fWAR. He came up short in the counting stats (104 innings versus 161 will do that), but he beat the rate stats and basically hit the value: a 3-WAR pitcher with an ace ceiling, when healthy. I thought re-signing him should’ve been a top priority this offseason. He’s the exact kind of talent their rotation needs, but I’m wrong.
It wasn’t a cultural fit. Snell rubbed Buster Posey and so many other former players (and fans) the wrong way that he wound up being more trouble than he’s worth, I guess. It’s hard not to read into that, given the state of the Giants — oh, they can’t tolerate great talent on their team; that really says it all, doesn’t it? — but at the same time, Snell has had an odd career despite the success.
He’s an atypical ace and because he’s been able to command so much money, that’s made him an enemy of the majority of fans and players. He doesn’t quite fit a mold. If he rubs you the wrong way, I’d offer that a lot of baseball players — particularly pitchers — rub me the wrong way, and I think that’s just the cost of doing business (being a baseball fan): some players are annoying. Maybe readers would take this to heart if he’d signed anywhere, but he’s a Dodger now, and in between injuries and requested days off, he’ll probably be one of the most dominant pitchers a lineup in the National League West will face in a season.
In so many ways, he followed in the footsteps of Kevin Gausman and Carlos Rodon — Farhan Zaidi’s high AAV mercenary ace to bridge the gap between having no rotation and developing one. With that plan and Farhan Zaidi firmly in the rearview mirror and the franchise’s desire to pretend the last six years never happened, maybe we should forget that Blake Snell was ever a Giant, too. It should be easy. He’s a Dodger.