Blake Snell is doing this all the time (more often)

When the World Series opens Friday night at Rogers Center, Blake Snell will look to replicate the success he’s had so far in October for the Dodgers against the Blue Jays. After missing the regular season due to injury, the two-time Cy Young winner absolutely dominated opposing hitters in his first three postseason starts, producing one of the most impressive October performances in recent years.

Running – remember those? — hard to come by during the start of Snell’s playoff run. In the Wild Card Series opener against the Reds, he allowed two runs in the seventh inning after allowing no runs on one hit and one walk (nine strikeouts) through the first six innings. Since then he has gone 14 straight scoreless innings, including six against the Phillies in Game 2 of the Division Series and then eight against the Brewers in Game 1 of the Championship Series. He allowed just one hit in each of his final two starts, and while he walked four Phillies (and struck out nine again), he struck out 10 without walking any Brewers.

Thanks to Caleb Durbin’s catch, Snell faced at least 24 batters in eight innings, the first perfect game anyone other than Don Larsen faced in the postseason in the 1956 World Series. It was only the second time in Snell’s 10-year major league career that he had gone eight innings, the other being his no-hitter on August 2, 2024 against the Padres. He needed just 103 pitches to complete Milwaukee’s masterpiece, which was just the third time this season he’d eclipse 100 innings. The Dodgers bullpen (in this case, Roki Sasaki and Blake Trenin) put Snell’s gem in jeopardy as they would allow three walks, a double and a sacrifice fly, but Trenin struck out Brice Turang, whose bases-loaded run iced the game. It wasn’t even the first time that the Dodgers’ shaky bullpen was sullied and nearly squandered a postseason gem from Snell, as Alex Vicia and Edgardo Henriquez allowed the Reds to score three runs en route to a 10-5 win, Emmett Sheehan and Treinen combined to hold the Phillies up three runs, and then Vicia and Sasaki shut the door in a 4-3 victory.

With the caveat that he has one or two starts left and fewer total innings than those who have appeared in the World Series, Snell’s postseason performance so far puts him among the best players of the wild-card era (since 1995):

The Snell-era leading FIP was driven by the third-highest strikeout rate (38.9%) and fifth-highest strikeout-to-walk differential (31.9%) among starters with at least 20 innings in a single postseason game; this year’s Skubal model leads in both categories (48% and 42.7%, respectively). Snell didn’t allow a single home run in his 21 innings, though 13 other pitchers did as well at the cutoff, and he almost certainly won’t catch Lee, who didn’t allow a single home run in 40.1 innings in 2009.

Because of his tendency to avoid the strike zone as often as possible — only two other pitchers among the 224 qualifying pitchers from 2020-25 had a zone percentage lower than his 44.5 percent — Snell isn’t usually the pitcher to watch the most. I’m not entirely sure if that was during his 2023 season with the Padres or 2024 with the Giants, but one night when he faced the Dodgers, broadcaster Orel Hershiser groaned and endured oral surgery at the hands of a particularly sadistic dentist while watching Snell carefully avoid throwing strikes. indeed, baseball prospectus Patrick Dubuque, who discovered this zone rate stat a few months ago (I’ve since updated the data), described Snell’s style as “an aesthetically disgusting style of pitching that works the edge of the strike zone with cookie-cutter shark-like grace and speed that bleeds hitters to death.”

Contrary to that reputation, the 32-year-old southpaw has been efficient and effective while overwhelming and deceiving hitters in increasingly important games this fall. From 2020-24, Snell averaged 4.28 pitches per at-bat; in 2023, when he won his second Cy Young title with the Padres, he averaged 4.25, the highest among two league qualifiers. This year, he traded some strikeouts and walks for contact and cut it to a career-low 4.00; in the postseason, he’s averaging 4.06.

Mind you, this is a short season for Snell, his second in a row. This is his second free-agent trip of the offseason, after he signed a five-year, $182 million contract with the Dodgers in late November but made just two starts before being sidelined by shoulder soreness in early April and missing nearly four months. Upon his return, he had a great August and an even better September, finishing his season by allowing just one run and nine hits in 18 innings against the Rockies, Phillies and Diamondbacks while striking out 28 and walking just nine.

Snell finished his abbreviated season with a 2.35 ERA and 2.69 FIP in 61.1 innings. Including three postseason starts, he posted a 0.68 ERA, 1.09 FIP, 39.4% strikeout rate, and 7% walk rate in his final 40 innings (also not allowing a home run). During that time, batters batted .114 and had a slugging percentage of .137.

Separating Snell’s regular and playoff numbers, we can see just how dominant he has been since the playoffs began:

So how does he do all this? For one thing, Snell used a different combination of tones. While his average four-seam fastball velocity increased by 1.1 mph over the regular season (96.2 mph, up from 95.1 mph in the regular season), he threw heaters significantly less frequently to hitters on both sides of the plate, while putting more emphasis on his changeup against right-handers and more curve against lefties; these were the hallmarks of his lackluster performance. Against right-handers, he reduces his use of the curve, his down-in pitch:

With these retooled repertoires, Snell confounded hitters, and he did it in novel ways, pitching in the strike zone more often (49 percent) than in any season since his rookie season in 2016:

Snell still spends less time in the strike zone than the average bear, but the gap has narrowed in October. His regular-season zone percentage was 7.6 points below league average (52.4%), but in the playoffs, he was only 4.7 points below league average (51.5%). Batters approached him cautiously, taking fewer swings whether his pitches were in the zone or not, but because he threw more strikes, he led the count and generated more swings and misses. Here are the details of his pitches in the area:

Snell is throwing his changeup in the zone much more often than he did in the regular season, with batters hitting the ball 62.2 percent of the time. Compare this pitch’s heat map to right-handers:

Neither left-handers nor right-handers can do many things any Snell’s secondary pitches, when they’re in the zone – admittedly not often outside of a changeup – and they do less damage to his four-seamer. As for when he will leave the area…

No, batters don’t do much besides blow against these pitches either. When he misses, they don’t even collect fluke hits from his four-seamer like they did in the regular season.

Equally impressive is how well Snell suppresses hard contact. During the regular season, his average exit velocity, barrel rate, and slugging rate were all in the 86th to 96th percentile, and during the playoffs, his average exit velocity dropped by more than 4 mph and he has yet to allow a single barrel:

Even Snell’s projected stats look like the numbers a pitcher would hit at the plate if he still hit the ball.

Going back to the contact profile, one particular key to Snell’s ability to suppress hard contact is that he’s suddenly generating more ground balls. He hit 48.7 percent of his ground balls during the regular season, 6.6 points higher than his career mark and just half a point shy of his career high set in 11 games in 2020. During the postseason, his ground ball percentage soared to 69.2 percent, and his ground ball to fly ball ratio nearly doubled from 1.78 (already a career high with the usual caveat of shortening a season) to 3.38. Even though postseason batters haven’t thrown a single infield fly ball to him, he’s still done it and pulled the ball more often than he did during the regular season (43.5 percent vs. 37.8 percent). As for where those grounders come from:

Snell’s changeup was his most reliable pest-killing pitch in the regular season, and especially so in the postseason. Ten of the 11 pitches in the changeup were grounders, with an average exit velocity of 84.8 mph and a launch angle of -14 degrees. When you consider all of his secondary, they have an 85% ground ball rate, an average exit velocity of 79.9 mph, and a launch angle of -17 degrees.

We’ve long known that when Snell was in his prime, he was one of the best pitchers in the game. This is a man who, like Cy Young, has two era titles. The current version, however, is a different story. It all could come crashing down against the Blue Jays, as any dominant pitcher will have a tendency to regress in such a small sample, and the American League champion’s aggressive, contact-oriented approach at the plate could result in enough sight hits (or ambush homers) to alter his game plan. Snell’s recent mixing prowess, on the other hand, highlights his confidence in his repertoire, conducting and approach. We shouldn’t be surprised if he continues this impressive run.