8:45pm: Snell receives a $15MM salary for the upcoming season and has a $17MM signing bonus that will not be paid until 2026, reports Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle (on X). That indicates he’ll be deciding on whether to opt out of a $30MM salary next winter, although the delayed date on the payment of the bonus reduces the team’s short-term commitment.
8:23pm: Blake Snell is in agreement with the Giants on a two-year, $62MM contract that allows him to opt out after the upcoming season, reports Jon Heyman of the New York Post (X link). San Francisco adds the defending NL Cy Young winner to the top of a staff that also includes last year’s runner-up, Logan Webb.
A two-year deal certainly isn’t what Snell had in mind at the beginning of the winter. He hit free agency coming off an otherworldly finish to the 2023 campaign. Snell’s platform season actually started shakily, as he allowed 15 runs over his first 23 frames. From the start of May onward, he was the best pitcher in the majors. Snell allowed only 1.78 earned runs per nine innings through 27 starts and 157 innings after April.
Despite the tough first month, the southpaw finished the year with a major league best 2.25 ERA across 180 frames. He punched out 31.5% of opposing hitters, a mark surpassed by only Spencer Strider and Tyler Glasnow among pitchers with at least 100 innings. No other starter missed more bats on a per-swing basis. Opponents made contact on just 64.2% of their swings against Snell, narrowly better than Strider’s 64.3% figure for the lowest rate in the majors.
As a result, Snell cruised to the second Cy Young of his career. He received 28 of 30 first-place votes. He’d won the American League Cy Young as a member of the Rays five seasons earlier behind an AL-best 1.89 ERA over 31 starts. He joined Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander and Jacob deGrom as active pitchers with multiple Cy Young wins.
The 2018 and ’23 seasons are, rather remarkably, the only seasons in which Snell has appeared on Cy Young ballots. That points to some amount of inconsistency over the course of his career, which is mostly attributable to scattershot control. Snell has walked nearly 11% of batters faced over his seven-plus big league seasons. Last season’s 13.3% walk percentage was the highest rate of his career. Snell led the majors with 99 free passes, the first pitcher to do so in a Cy Young-winning campaign in more than 60 years.
Snell has never been a bad pitcher, but the inconsistent strike-throwing has kept him from turning in ace production on an annual basis. He posted an ERA ranging from 3.24 to 4.29 in the four seasons between his award-winning campaigns. While Snell fanned over 30% of opposing hitters every year, working deep counts kept him from logging massive workloads. He has averaged a little less than 5 1/3 innings per start over the course of his career. He reached the 180-inning mark in each of his Cy Young campaigns but didn’t surpass 130 frames in any other season.
It seems as if the market didn’t value Snell as a clear-cut ace despite the strength of his platform year. The only other publicly reported offer which he received was a six-year, $150MM proposal from the Yankees back in January. When Snell didn’t accept, New York inked Marcus Stroman to a two-year deal. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale tweets that the Yankees took their offer off the table last month and declined to reengage over the weekend.
More to come.
