Blake Snell's Master Plan

Blake Snell had one of the most bizarre Cy Young seasons ever. Was it all luck?

Intro

Snell shocked the world when he won the 2023 NL Cy Young Award, becoming the 7th pitcher to win it in both leagues, and shocked the world again by the way he did it. He walked many hitters, struck out even more, and proved inadvertently that WHIP and baserunners don't matter when you never allow hard contact. One could call that two true outcomes. While many argue that his success isn't sustainable, in large part due to high ERA predictors and left on base rates, I think it's much more so than people think. 

Command

People’s foremost concern is with his control, but his high walk rate is very much intentional. While he may not have great command, he has plenty of control, meaning that he can ensure a pitch isn’t a meatball without knowing exactly where it’s going. Other elite pitchers have adopted a similar plan, with a zone rate in the same realm of his 32.6% throughout the years, proving its efficacy. In 2020, Shane Bieber dominated hitters to the tune of a 41% K rate with a league-lowest 34% zone rate, while only allowing 21 walks in 77 innings pitched. Many note that Bieber has elite command and control, and Bieber used that to his advantage, eliciting chases like Snell did in 2023 - curves and sliders smartly placed at the bottom of the zone to induce whiffs on half of the swings against them. Then there's Corbin Burnes, who won the 2021 Cy Young with the 6th-lowest zone rate at 38.6%, before having the lowest in a solid 2022 at 35.1%. For those keeping count, a bottom 6 zone rate has won 3 Cy Youngs in the past four years.

I've skipped over many other elite starters who like nibbling around the edges, like Gerrit Cole and Kevin Gausman, but it's clear that if the stuff plays, you can throw it almost anywhere. In exchange for this surplus of walks, Snell allowed 11 fewer hits than any other qualified starter, despite throwing 18 more innings than the qualifier mark would require. You need to scroll all the way down to Nick Pivetta, at 142.2 IP, to find someone with less hits allowed. While WHIP paints a mediocre picture of him at 1.19, it doesn’t adequately represent his skillset. WHIP values walks and hits equally, despite hits being far more detrimental to one’s start; walks can only ever be one base! Stellar analysis from me, as usual.

Pitches

(The overall statistics are for starting pitchers with at least 300 pitches in that given pitch group.)

Fastball

Despite being well-known for his fastballs up, breaking balls down style (BSB), Snell placed far fewer fastballs up in the zone than the league average, with a heavy emphasis on pitches down the zone. This change occurred several years ago, when he joined the Padres in 2021, but it hasn't made much of a difference. He throws it more in the zone than any other pitch, but it still only amounts to a 44.7% rate, according to PitcherList, the 14th lowest amongst starters. With no real standout characteristics, very few people are fooled. He threw it for a strike far less than the average and gave up 64 walks on it, compared to 65 strikeouts. His fastball is the same stable offering it always has been, not possessing any standout qualities but limiting hard contact with its very deliberate placement, and sets up the rest of his pitches well. I question whether it deserves near 50% usage, but if it ain’t broke, don't fix it, I suppose.

Curve

Speaking of deliberate placement and outstanding pitches, we have Blake Snell's curveball. When it's at its best, results follow: it had a 39% chase rate with just a 24.1% zone rate, 2nd lowest amongst all starters. He turned to it more this year than years prior, and a 100th percentile swinging strike rate and 30.9% hard-contact rate was a worthy reward. It gave up three home runs this year from its crazy careful location, and despite being buried below in the lower third an insane 90% of the time, he allowed only 11 walks on it, compared to 109 strikeouts. The quality of this pitch, with 10 inches of induced drop and 12 inches of horizontal movement, is what makes his whole repertoire work. The average for LHP curves in both directions is only 8 inches, for reference. 

Changeup

Snell's most critical improvement was with his changeup, which went from unthrowable in 2021, to barely used in 2022, and finally a focal point in 2023. In 2021, it didn't fool anyone, forcing him to slowly drop its usage from 22% in April to zilch in August or September. Despite throwing it over 200 times, it only resulted in a strikeout twice, compared to 18 hits and 2 home runs. In the last two months of the season, when he didn't throw it at all, he had an ERA under 2 and four 10+ strikeout games, foreshadowing the future success to come. In 2022, he dropped it to just 5% usage, which allowed it to double its whiff rate, and improved his overall results dramatically to a sub-3.50 ERA with a passable 9.5% BB% to go along with his elite 32% K%.

In 2023, its performance went through the roof. Its swinging strike rate climbed from 17.8% to 25%, and went for a first strike from 34.9% to 61%. The main change is an increase in zone rate - unlike his other secondaries, he threw it more in the zone than last year. Snell’s changeup ran into trouble when it ended up in uncompetitive locations in 2021, inducing tons of walks for minimal chase potential. While the location wasn’t elite in 2023, the movement of the pitch kept it able to perform at a high level. I’m not sure if it's “25% swinging-strike rate” good, but 18-20% feels right, and still makes it a dominant offering.

Slider

Snell ran the lowest slider zone rate of all starters with my qualifications (25%), and unlike his other pitches, it actually suffered because of it. It still had a 22% swinging strike rate and a 53.5% whiff rate, but a decrease in usage from 24% over the previous two years to just 13% in 2023 indicates he feels the same way. It will always see some use, because it helps bridge his heater and curve, and isn’t expected to perform at an exceptional level. It’s last on the list because even if it underperforms, given its other purposes, there’s nothing wrong with the pitch’s output.

Luck

Many people are concerned about the left-on-base luck, but in the era of attacking the zone and resigning oneself to giving up the home run, Snell wants to be contrarian. He will never give you a breaking ball in the zone, and will walk you if necessary to prove it. He had the 4th lowest number of home runs given up this year by qualified starters, behind Bradish, Sonny Gray, and Steele, and ran an average 12.5% HR/FB rate, indicating that he's not getting any home run luck going his way, either.

I was curious how much his unique approach impacted his LOB rate, so I did a quick linear regression to check the impact of his three main variables: K%, BB% and BABIP. It says that K rate and BABIP are statistically significant predictors of LOB rate to a high degree of confidence (0.1%), but interestingly, the BB rate is not significant at all, even at 10% confidence. As discussed before, Snell goes out of his way to avoid hard contact, limiting his BABIP significantly. While a .256 BABIP and 86% LOB rate are both outliers, Snell's playing to the outlier through mitigating hard contact and K% makes a consistently above-average mark sustainable, and is backed by back-of-the-napkin modeling. 

In both cases, the model predicts a LOB% of around 77%, around 5% more than the average of 70-72% from a 2010 FanGraphs article. A Pr(t) value below 0.05 is generally considered significant.

The other consideration is the quality of contact that he gave up. Snell saw less hard contact on his three secondaries than ever, especially so on his patented curveball, but this was a direct consequence of his strategy of avoiding the zone. He dropped his zone rate on his curve and sinker by 10%, in conjunction with a spike in changeup zone rate, to create this hard contact drop that led him to a near career-low .256 BABIP and 33.8% hard-contact rate. One may expect the changeup to return to more reasonable levels, but it's all been engineered in unison. Ruben Niebla, named the Padres' pitching coach before the 2022 season, was the assistant pitching coach for the Guardians during Bieber's Cy Young campaign. Perhaps he saw a parallel in secondary performance and pounced in the offseason preceding 2023. 

Conclusion

My research on Snell surprised me because his success is much more intentional than almost anyone seems to give him credit for. He decided to avoid the zone more than almost anyone else has, probably ever, to take advantage of the elite deception of his breaking pitches while mitigating the importance of the relative mediocrity of his fastball. The only time he's thrown the fastball less was in 2019, when he was even better in his peripherals than his Cy Young 2018 season! He realized that his weakness was hard contact, and reduced it to the extreme. Despite this adjustment that would theoretically hurt his start length, he only went less than five innings three times, a much better mark than prior years, when he also made a career-high in starts this year with a full 32.

Long-term, there are great signs as well. His pitches are virtually all the same, and should be expected to perform similarly in future years with this approach. His fastball is only 95, so he doesn't rely on elite velocity to perform at the highest level, something that is very dependent on age and good health. His luck-based metrics constitute a significant outlier, but his approach is also a major outlier, which helps produce those favorable outcomes that seem odd from a distance.

Spotrac gives him a $24 million salary valuation, which seems reasonable over six years. He'll likely get $30 million or more, and he might be worth that. At the very least, Snell will probably produce more in the later years of his contract than his fellow free agent options because of his unique characteristics and reliance on deception, rather than overpowering hitters on high velocity in the zone.

Personally? I'd cap out at 7 years and $180 million. Even that's likely a little high; free agency contracts always seem reasonable, until they aren't. The Padres know what I'm talking about.

Sources:

FanGraphs

PitcherList

BaseballSavant

Alex Chamberlain’s Pitch Leaderboard