TORONTO -- DURING THE seventh inning of Major League Baseball postseason games he watched as a child, Blake Snell would stand, put his hand over his heart and sing in the living room of his home in Shoreline, Washington. There was something wondrous about the whole spectacle -- the entire stadium out of their seats, belting out "God Bless America" in unison, and the pitcher smack dab in the middle of it -- that burrowed into Snell's head, never to be forgotten, every start an opportunity to become the sort of pitcher he once watched and revered.
"All I've ever wanted to do is just be on the mound in the seventh inning of a playoff game when 'God Bless America' is playing," Snell said. "That's the coolest thing to me. I've been chasing that for 20-something years. Twenty years. And then in Milwaukee, I finally got to feel that."
Eleven days ago at American Family Field, during Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, everything came together in one near-perfect night. For the previous two decades, Snell had built himself from skinny project to big leaguer. From main character of one of the most controversial decisions in modern baseball to the 22nd player ever to capture multiple Cy Youngs. From naive prospect to learner with a voracious appetite to the man ready to take all of those experiences and make "God Bless America" a reality. And there he was, atop the mound, the criticism that he couldn't go deep into games forever eradicated by one of the great pitching performances in postseason history.
As Snell prepares to start Game 1 of the World Series for the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers against the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday, he does so coming off eight innings of one-hit, walk-free, 10-strikeout baseball. Milwaukee swung and missed at 22 of Snell's 103 pitches. Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy called it "the most dominant performance against us" in his 10 years with the Brewers.
To Snell, it was preordained. It took four teams, 10 years and countless failures. It needed the insight of teammates, the wisdom of coaches and the support of his wife. But it was always bound to happen, Snell believed, because piece by piece, he's been building something. Good would not be good enough. Great, either. He wanted to be 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds of inimitability and inevitability.
"I've always wanted to be the best pitcher in the world," Snell said. "I've always chased it."
This October, he has found it. Among all the titans who pitched this postseason -- from Detroit's Tarik Skubal to Boston's Garrett Crochet to fellow Dodgers star Yoshinobu Yamamoto -- Snell has been the best. The fastball up to 99, the darting changeup, the slider and curveball now more thinking man's pitches than wastes to induce chase. It's all there, an impressive feat, but that's only half the story.
How he got here is the other half.
IN 2018, AT 26 years old, Blake Snell messed around and won the American League Cy Young Award. The Tampa Bay Rays had drafted Snell with the 52nd pick seven years earlier and brought him along slowly. His left arm crackled with electricity and at-bats against him were ground faults. Even if Snell had a well-earned reputation for walking too many batters, the hopelessness of hitters trying to square up his pitches in the strike zone carved Snell a path to the major leagues. Three years into his major league career, operating on instinct more than know-how, he won 21 games and posted a 1.89 ERA in 180⅔ innings.
"You're young and dumb, so you're fearless because you don't know," Snell said. "You think you're invincible, that you'll be the best ever, but you're not doing stuff to set yourself up that way. I had incredible talent. In '19, I'm like, I'm going to do it again. And then reality check."
His ERA ballooned to 4.29 that following season. Batters hit more than 100 points higher on balls in play than they had in 2018. Snell started doubting himself. He regarded it as a bad thing. He did not, at the time, understand the value of failure and what it forced him to teach himself.
"You start asking yourself questions, and you start asking other people questions," he said. "What'd you see? What was different? And it's like, well, you can't try to be the same guy. It's a new season. So then you learn from that, OK, well, I'm not going to be the same guy. I'm going to be present with who I am today."
Who he is today is altogether different from who he was then. Snell spraying the ball all over the place did little to engender confidence from the Rays, even on the days he looked like the best pitcher in the world. The short outings and inconsistencies came to a head on Oct. 27, 2020, during Game 6 of the World Series. Snell was carving the Dodgers, holding firm to a 1-0 lead. With one out in the sixth inning, Los Angeles catcher Austin Barnes poked a single to center field, just the second hit Snell had allowed during a no-walk, nine-strikeout clinic. Manager Kevin Cash emerged from the dugout to remove Snell, who had thrown 73 pitches. Within six pitches from reliever Nick Anderson, the Rays trailed 2-1 and lost the World Series that night.
Snell was crestfallen. Not at Cash's decision -- "My dad always told me at a young age," he said recently, "you respect your manager and you never second-guess his decision, so I never do" -- but at the outcome and what it said about his lack of trustworthiness. He was too good to be regarded as a liability.
"You knew there's more here," Snell said. "I'm capable of more."
Barely two months later, the Rays traded Snell to San Diego, where in 2021 he vacillated between dominance and ineffectiveness. The next winter, the Padres hired Ruben Niebla as their pitching coach, and in their first phone conversation, Niebla asked Snell what he needed. The answer excited Niebla: just someone to talk with, to bounce ideas off, to learn from.
"There's a sense of him really wanting to piece together what baseball success looks like from an overhead view," Niebla said. "And I think that stems from his curiosity -- and his curiosity a lot of times goes into observing others and then asking the questions, 'Why does he do this? Can I do that?' That's his way of saying: I want to be the best. And I'm gonna observe and I'm gonna pay attention to how the best do it."
Niebla quickly learned Snell's vulnerabilities. The walks that hounded Snell his whole career had burrowed inside of his head. Niebla disabused him of the notion they were an inherently bad thing. "I don't care if you walk guys," Niebla said. "They're not scoring anyway." The next spring, Snell arrived at Padres camp intent on recapturing the changeup that he threw only 5% of the time in 2022, a fraction of his early-career usage with the Rays.
"You want to throw this pitch?" Niebla asked.
"I really do," Snell said.
"Then go throw it," Niebla said.
"It ain't that good," Snell said.
"It's not that good because you don't think it's good," Niebla said. "Let it perform in the game, and then we can make adjustments. But I cannot give you the prescription without you showing me what the issue is."
Snell started throwing the changeup more. His feel for the pitch grew. The action on it flummoxed hitters, particularly right-handers who flailed as it tailed away from them. It marked the rebirth of the pitch that Brewers hitters whiffed on 14 times on 23 swings during that NLCS start, with the velocity ranging from 79.3 to 87.2 mph, prompting Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman to declare: "It's like three different pitches."
The changeup propelled Snell to a 2023 season almost identical to 2018. Yes, he walked a lot of batters -- a major league-high 99, in fact. He also led the big leagues both years in ERA and hits allowed per nine innings. Niebla was right. The walks didn't score. And Snell joined Gaylord Perry, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Roy Halladay and Max Scherzer -- all Hall of Fame-caliber talents -- as the only pitchers to win the Cy Young in both leagues.
It wasn't just the changeup, of course. Snell was not young and dumb anymore. He was wizened and wise, cognizant that pitchers are at their best when they don't rely exclusively on talent. The electricity in his arm remained; it also had gravitated to his head, allowing him to change his plans of attack on the fly and focus as much on hitters' mannerisms and swings as the quality of his own stuff.
"Feel of the game is the most important thing, but you can't teach it," Snell said. "You have to watch the game, and you have to be involved in the game. You have to experience it, right? You experience it on the mound, but then you watch the game. What do you see? I can watch one player the whole time from when he swings. Let's say he strikes out, goes in the dugout. I can track him, then see him walk onto the field. How does he act? What is he doing with his teammates? And how do I get in his head? How do I make him overthink? You're playing the game, and it's learning it and figuring it out and the failure of it and the success. It's the best. It's the best man. I wish I could have known so much in my 20s."
Snell entered free agency that winter coming off his second Cy Young with expectations of landing a megadeal. One never materialized. On March 20, 2024, the day the Padres and Dodgers kicked off the season in South Korea, Snell agreed to a two-year, $62 million contract with San Francisco that included an opt-out after the first season. Groin injuries limited him to just five starts over the season's first two months. Over his final 14 starts, he found his Cy Young self again, posting a 1.23 ERA and striking out 114 in 80⅓ innings.
The advice he had received from Giants ace Logan Webb, who this year became the first pitcher in more than half a decade to throw at least 200 innings for three consecutive seasons, fueled the run. Webb, like everyone who sees Snell, marveled at his raw stuff. "I don't know how anybody hits the guy," Webb said. But the lack of quality on Snell's misses bothered Webb. Snell had the ability to locate his stuff. If he was going to throw a pitch outside of the strike zone to try to tempt hitters to chase, Webb told him, he needed to be a little finer -- to throw higher-quality misses.
"Outs are outs," Webb said. "I would tell him, 'You're too good to miss by such a big margin. You can throw this pitch in the zone and most likely you're gonna get a swing and miss.' Even if it's not, it's not gonna be hard contact. It's gonna be an out most likely. When he's on and when he's in the zone, [he] is easily the best pitcher in baseball. It's the best stuff in baseball. It's a lefty throwing 98 with incredible other pitches. It's a blast to watch him in person."
That changed this past winter, when he opted out of his contract with the Giants and hit the market. On Day 1 of free agency, the Dodgers reached out to let Snell know he was their top priority. Snell likewise appreciated Los Angeles for its unbridled devotion to winning, regardless of the cost. A five-year, $182 million deal later, he was a Dodger.
LAST MONTH AGAINST the Philadelphia Phillies, in Snell's second-to-last start of the regular season, he entered the seventh inning having allowed just two hits and got a pair of quick outs. Snell then walked Nick Castellanos and Max Kepler, prompting Dodgers manager Dave Roberts to visit the mound with reliever Alex Vesia warm and a 3-0 lead under threat. As Roberts approached the mound, Snell pleaded to stay in the game. He was at 107 pitches, sure, but he felt good, and he wanted to end the inning. Even though Vesia had come onto the field, Snell managed to talk Roberts out of yanking him. He started the at-bat with two balls and ended it with three consecutive strikes, the final a 95 mph fastball located perfectly at the top of the zone and on the outside corner. The Dodgers won 5-0, avoided getting swept by the Phillies and went on to take eight of their final 10 games.
"It springboarded us into the postseason," Dodgers reliever Jack Dreyer said. "That moment, I was like, 'Wow, he's special.'"
Like with Niebla in San Diego and Webb in San Francisco, Snell has found his people in Los Angeles. They're in entirely different corners of the organization, from Clayton Kershaw in the clubhouse to Sandy Koufax in the Hall of Famer's visits with the team to the pitching philosophers in the coaches' room to Andrew Friedman, who drafted Snell in Tampa Bay, in the front office. They have imbued Snell with confidence, told him to be exactly who he is, which is one of the best pitchers on the planet.
"I can throw the ball wherever I want, and I know I can," Snell said. "That's another thing about being a Dodger. Everything's highlighted, everyone's watching. So if you're going to say it, back it up, prove it. And I love that. I'm good with that."
His first real test came in the Dodgers' postseason opener against the Cincinnati Reds, when he got the ball ahead of Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani. Snell cruised through six shutout innings on 70 pitches. He came out for the top of the seventh figuring Cincinnati would change its approach, so he planned to alter his as well. That was a mistake. The Reds tagged him for a pair of runs. Which happens to be the only ones he has allowed this October. He limited the Phillies to one hit over six shutout innings in Game 2 of the NLCS. And then came the Milwaukee gem, the "God Bless America" game, a far cry from getting hooked at 73 pitches in the game that allowed the Dodgers to win their first World Series in 32 years.
"That was five years ago. We lost, and who knows what would've happened if I kept going? No one knows," Snell said. "We have ideas. Yeah, I'm confident, but we don't know. It's a guess because it didn't happen. I'm going to keep learning, getting better and now I have opportunities here to really dominate and showcase the kind of pitcher I am.
"I've got a lot to prove to myself. I always tell people close to me before I pitch what it means, what they mean to me. It's just when I go out there, that's what I pitch for."
It's for his wife, Haeley, and their two baby boys. It's for his dad, who was a minor league pitcher, and for his brothers, and for the rest of his family and friends, and for the travel ball organization, Zilla National, that Snell spends countless hours organizing, scouring the country for the best youth players, including Taz Tulowitzki, the son of five-time All-Star Troy Tulowitzki.
At the end of the day, though, it's for himself. And that's not selfish of Snell. It's him growing up and recognizing that scraping every last whit of talent from oneself takes as much strength mentally as it does physically, the grind of baseball as unrelenting and the letdowns as pervasive as they are.
It has taken 10 years for Snell to find himself and an organization willing to commit to that. And what it has brought out in him is the Blue Jays' problem Friday.
"They want me to be the best version of me," Snell said. "They'll do anything to help me be that. The conversations we have about greatness -- and being around Kershaw and Sandy and guys that have done it and want you to learn and grow -- I never want to get to a place where I feel like I've maxed out or this is the best I can be. I want to learn. I want to evolve."