Struggling Pitchers: Part 2

Over the past few seasons, the Tampa Bay Rays have been nothing short of baffling. In 2018 they went from a full-scale rebuild to a playoff contender seemingly mid-season. Countless trades they’ve made have gone from major head-scratchers to paying off in the Rays’ favor, including:

• Trading big-name prospect Matthew Liberatore for Jose Martinez and a nobody at the time who turned out to be Randy Arozarena

• Trading ace Chris Archer for two young prospects who had yet to perform in the big leagues (Austin Meadows and Tyler Glasnow)

• Trading top prospect Jesus Sanchez and a righty reliever Ryne Stanek for a lesser (at the time) righty reliever Nick Anderson

• Trading their closer Emilio Pagan to the Padres for a prospect and a fielding-first Manuel Margot, who is hitting much better since joining Tampa

• Acquiring an afterthought in a much bigger David Price trade who ended up being Willy Adames

They’ve also found guys out of nowhere, such as Ji-Man Choi and Joey Wendle. The bottom line is, the Rays are arguably the most advanced team in baseball, in terms of analytics. They’re the new-age Moneyball. Which is why I believe when we look back in a few years, the Rays will have won the Blake Snell trade.

First, let’s take a look at Blake Snell and what he’s doing wrong this season. In terms of just 2021, he’s walked a lot more batters than normal. His walks per 9 innings hadn’t eclipsed 4 since 2017, and he holds a career average of 3.90 in that stat. Yet somehow, he’s managed to reach 6.3 BB/9 in 2021 and is in the bottom 10 percent of MLB pitchers in walk percentage. A lot of this is due to a subpar first-pitch strike percentage, as Snell has thrown 56% of his first pitches for strikes, compared to 67% just 2 seasons ago, and a 2021 league average of 59%. Additionally, a league average of 30% of pitches outside the zone were swung at. Yet Snell resides at 28%, after being at 35% just last year in that category.

So we’ve established that compared to the rest of his career, in 2021 Snell hasn’t been pounding the zone and that’s negatively affected him. But the real beginning of the regression oddly began in 2020. 2020 was an incredibly lucky season for Snell. His ERA sat at 3.24 compared to an xERA of 4.21. This can be explained by his sharp increase in hard contact given up: in 2019, Snell gave up hard hits on 32% of the opponent's batted balls, and 4.7% of the batted balls were barreled. In 2020, the former increased to 37%, and the latter increased to 10%. This regression can also be seen with the xwOBA of his opposing batters: in 2019 he was top 10 percent in the league in that category with .265, that number regressed to .314 in 2020, and then due to walks in 2021 it regressed even further to .342, now located in the bottom third of MLB. The Rays likely noticed all these trends, his good luck didn’t travel to San Diego with him, and it has left him underwhelming so far with the Padres.

Returning to his departure from Tampa Bay, Snell was traded for 2 right-handed pitching prospects in Luis Patino and Cole Wilcox, along with 2 catchers--prospect Blake Hunt and young MLB catcher Francisco Mejia. Wilcox and Hunt were the 7th and 14th ranked prospects in the Padres’ system, respectively. Mejia was once a top prospect and is still just 25 years old, and Patino, the biggest part of the deal, was the Padres’ number 3 prospect and MLB’s 23rd ranked prospect at the time of the trade. With my limited knowledge of minor league baseball, I’m not sure where these players will end up. However, I do know that the Rays know what they’re doing, and surely have the coaching, analytics, and player development to turn at least one of these guys into stars.

Overall, Snell finds himself in a downward spiral, which started below the surface in 2020, but is now visible in San Diego. The Rays knew this all too well when trading him, and got a big haul of prospects from a team overflowing with young prospect talent. A lot of people were left confused as to why the Rays dealt Snell, but I think it’s all too evident now. It wasn’t because he was upset about game 6, it wasn’t because the Rays are starting a rebuild. It was because the Rays knew of his incoming regression, and found some prospects they believe they’re capable of developing to take his place.