Should the Giants sign the reigning National Cy Young Award winner?
That shouldn’t be a complicated question. Yes. Yes, the Giants should give a lot of money to the pitcher who finished first in the award for the best pitcher in the league, and they should put him in the rotation with the pitcher who finished second for that same award. That seems like a great way to prevent runs.
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However, I regret to inform you that it’s complicated. Blake Snell is a fine pitcher who deserved the Cy Young Award based on his results from last season. The team that signs him won’t be guaranteed those results, though. They’ll get his future results.
Trying to predict those future results with any sort of confidence? Complicated. Confusing. Risky. And a team will be paying him $30 million or more each season over several seasons as they find out if they predicted them correctly.
On the other hand, the answer to the question posted in the beginning of this article should always be “Yes.” Yes, sign the Cy Young winner, and hope for the best. It’s not my money. It’s not your money, unless Charles Johnson is reading this. And if you are reading this, can I have a loan of roughly $3 billion to buy the Oakland A’s? I’m good for it.
Here’s a look at how the Giants could use Blake Snell.
Why the Giants would want Blake Snell
A list of pitchers who have won two or more Cy Young Awards with more than five seasons in between awards:
• Roger Clemens
• Randy Johnson
• Steve Carlton
• Justin Verlander
• Max Scherzer
• Tom Seaver
• Roy Halladay
• Tom Glavine
• Gaylord Perry
• Blake Snell
That’s a nice, tidy list of Hall of Famers … and Snell. It includes Giants legends like Gaylord Perry, Randy Johnson, Steve Carlton and Justin Verlander (honorary). The reason I set the cutoff at five seasons was to make sure the list had pitchers with longevity instead of pitchers who had shorter, Cy-stealing bursts, like Jacob deGrom or Johan Santana. It suggests a pitcher who can maintain his stuff and health, or someone who can adjust to a change in either and remain effective.
Snell won his first Cy Young Award in 2018, when he was 25. He’s throwing just as hard as ever, with as clean of a velocity chart over time as you’ll ever see. His curveball was one of the best pitches in baseball back then, and it still is today. Look at this sucker:
Blake Snell, Nasty 81mph Curveball. 😨
[Framing is overrated] pic.twitter.com/af8cSftFaD
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 26, 2023
The stuff is so good that even in Snell’s down seasons, he’s still generally effective. He’s had ERAs in the low 4.00s before, but he’s never had a true disaster season that prevents his team from winning games. His WAR, according to Baseball Reference, has been at least 1.0 in every season since he was a rookie. While some of those seasons were disappointing by Snell’s standards — and wouldn’t come close to being worth the $30 million or so he’ll get every year — they were at least helpful. Contrast that with, say, Barry Zito, who was actively harming the Giants’ postseason chances in his worst seasons.
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This section will be shorter than the next section not because the argument is weaker, but because the answer is tautological. The Giants should sign the guy who has been preventing runs at a high level for several years because he’s been preventing runs at a high level for several years.
It’s not rocket science.
Why the Giants wouldn’t want Blake Snell
It’s not rocket science, but it is baseball, which is at least 70 times more complicated. There’s a reason a man walked on the moon 15 years before on-base percentage became an official statistic.
So let’s talk about ERA, the omnipresent statistic that’s both familiar and deceiving. It’s also helpful, don’t get me wrong — it’s easy to understand, and over a long enough sample, it’s almost as predictive as advanced stats, like FIP. And I’m absolutely fine with using it to determine who should win a Cy Young Award, which is an award for what actually happened, not what should have happened or what is likelier to happen in the future. Snell allowed about two runs for every nine innings he pitched this past season, on average. That’s awesome. Good for him.
The more you look at that fancy 2.25 ERA, though, the more it starts to look unrepeatable. Snell led the majors in walks with 99, and he has one of the lowest ERAs ever from a pitcher who walked at least four batters per nine innings pitched. The only two pitchers to have a lower ERA with that high of a walk rate in the last 100 years are Nolan Ryan and Sam McDowell.
A Gaylord Perry and a Sam McDowell reference in the same Giants article? It’s hard to get a better way to show off the spectrum of possible outcomes for Snell. Either he keeps rolling through his 30s and makes the Hall of Fame, or he becomes shorthand for Giants’ disappointment for several decades.
Blake Snell is a 2-time Cy Young Award winner (also in 2018 with the Rays).
He's the 7th pitcher to win the Cy Young in both leagues.
Randy Johnson is the only other lefty to win in both leagues. pic.twitter.com/OnHods1GVs
— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) November 15, 2023
Even scarier, that search was based on a BB/9 over 4.0, but Snell’s ratio was 5.0, a full walk over that. If you make that the cutoff, Snell stands alone. Being effectively wild is one thing, but it’s hard to allow that many free baserunners without getting punished for it. It takes a special trick to dance between the raindrops like that.
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Snell’s trick is that he dominated with runners in scoring position. Of the 175 batters he faced with RISP, he allowed just 23 hits. Of those, only eight were extra-base hits (one homer, seven doubles). Snell had one of the highest left-on-base percentages of the new millennium. You might be saying, “That’s great! He’s at his best when the situation calls for it,” but make sure to click through that link and notice something: There sure aren’t a lot of pitchers who show up more than once near the top of the leaderboard. Clayton Kershaw did it twice, and so did Cole Hamels, but both of those seasons were outliers in their careers.
You can choose to believe that leaving runners stranded is a special skill, and that Snell has it. He’s had seasons like it before — in 2018, he allowed the lowest batting average with runners in scoring position of anyone over the last two decades — so there’s some ammunition for that argument. But if you’re talking about a repeatable skill, almost everything else points to success with runners in scoring position not being a repeatable skill. Otherwise, you’d see the same pitchers at the top of the leaderboards every year. One year, Jake Peavy did it with tremendous success; every other year, he didn’t. You can find this same thing for almost every other pitcher at the top of these searches. It almost never carried over for the next season.
Snell is a nasty, hard-to-hit pitcher, so it’s easy to believe that allows him to wriggle out of jams more than the average pitcher. But is he better at it than Randy Johnson or Pedro Martínez were? They were two of the nastiest, hardest-to-hit pitchers of all time, but they never prevented runners in scoring position better than Snell did last season (and in 2018). If you’re counting on it to happen again, you’re counting on him having a skill that even the inner-circle Hall of Famers didn’t have.
This isn’t to suggest that Snell is a bad pitcher, or that he wouldn’t be a fine addition to the 2024 Giants rotation. Not in the slightest. It’s just that if you’re expecting Cy Young run prevention, get ready to be disappointed. His FIPs should give you a better idea, and they’ve been between 2.80 and 4.35 over the last six seasons. Occasionally very good, occasionally merely fine. They typically aren’t the kind of FIPs that should make you want to give out a nine-figure contract.
Also, don’t forget that the Padres had an excellent defensive infield. That’ll always help shave some runs off the ERA and make a guy like Snell look much better.
Verdict
Someone will pay for last year’s stats instead of next year’s expected performance. They almost always do. The only way the Giants should be that team is if they miss out on their favorite target, who just might be Yoshinobu Yamamoto. It’s also possible that Snell is a better value than trading prospects for Corbin Burnes or Tyler Glasnow. Hoard those prospects, especially the pitchers.
If the Giants do sign Snell, don’t be crushed. The 2024 Giants would be instantly better on paper, and they’d probably be better on the field, too. Heck, you wouldn’t be able to accuse them of being frugal anymore, not that you’d stop. It would be a major signing for a team that’s desperate for one.
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The annual and total amounts for the contract would hurt the Giants’ chances to build future rosters, though. You don’t have to like it, and you might think that some of these owners need to stop worrying so much about “money” and “payroll” and “luxury taxes,” but you also know that they absolutely will. Snell’s salary would cause the Giants to spend less in future seasons. If they’re doing that without getting a lot of run prevention from Snell, hoo boy.
It’s possible that the Giants have a secret plan to get Snell’s walk rate down, which would make this a totally different conversation. As is, though, there are a lot of pitchers the Giants should prefer, from Marcus Stroman to Jordan Montgomery. I’ll pass on this one.
Hitters would say that about Snell’s pitches out of the strike zone, too. So when it comes to Snell on the Giants, give me a hard pass on the free passes. Snell’s timing for his contract season was simply too good.
Previous San Francisco Giants free-agent profiles
Yoshinobu Yamamoto, RHP
Shohei Ohtani, RHP/DH
Matt Chapman, 3B
(Top photo of Snell: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
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