PHOENIX – On any other team, Blake Snell would be the story of the camp.
The two-time Cy Young Award winner hasn’t delivered a single pitch from the mound in spring training as he takes a conservative approach in his return from a shoulder injury. His manager said the chances of him being ready for Opening Day are “probably zero.”
Snell declined to provide any insight into his situation when contacted Saturday morning.
“No,” he said before leaving the Dodgers clubhouse.
Not to make too much of a player refusing to talk to the media – Snell wasn’t particularly talkative in camp last year – but is Snell’s refusal to speak a sign of frustration?
“I think he wants to be healthy,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “He wants to be out there. I think for me there’s probably not much to say. He’s not on the mound right now. He’s not playing in games. The chances of him starting this season are probably zero. So I think for him it’s like he has to do his job to get back on the field.”
The timeline for when he has to do this has already changed. Two weeks before reporting for spring training, Snell was asked at the team’s fan fest if he would be ready for opening day.
“That’s the plan,” he said.
His unavailability early in the season isn’t much of an issue for the Dodgers, who can easily survive a month or two without him. They didn’t have him for four months last season, and his return in August prepared him well enough for a postseason run, in which he started five games and contributed 1 ⅓ innings of relief in Game 7 of the World Series.
October remains the priority, and the Dodgers believe they should be able to get through the regular season with a deep rotation anchored by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Glasnow.
Snell has said he’s okay with ramping up slowly, but his lack of durability has been a touchy subject for him in the past. He is a two-time Cy Young Award winner and has never pitched a 200-inning season or made an All-Star team. He has a reputation for not throwing deep in games.
The reputation bothered him so much that he immediately addressed it after pitching a no-hitter for the Giants in 2024.
“They can’t say it anymore,” Snell said. “Complete game, shutout, no-hitter. Leave me alone. ‘He’s not going to the ninth. He’s not going to the eighth.’ I just did it. Leave me alone.”
Snell threw just 104 innings for the Giants that season. In his first season with the Dodgers the following season, he threw just 61 ⅓.
But during the team’s fan fest, Snell called his first season with the Dodgers “perfect.”
“We won the World Series,” he said.
He was a workhorse on the way there. Entering the postseason as the Dodgers’ No. 1 starter, he pitched seven innings in Game 1 of a wild-card series against the Reds. His magnum opus came two rounds later when he pitched eight shutout innings against the Brewers in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series.
Based on his conversations with Snell, does Roberts think the experience has made him reconsider his priorities?
“I think he’s working through it in the sense that he was on a new team last year, he’s been pushing things through to start the season healthy, which is understandable,” Roberts said. “And you learn from it. He was never right all year.”
“I think this year he’s going to make sure he’s ready to go, and once he starts, to start healthy and finish strong. So I think he’s comfortable knowing that we need him, we’re counting on him, we believe in him. Then there’s the individual part where I think he wants another Cy Young, and what that means is you’ve got to be healthy, you’ve got to make starts. That’s something he’s personally committed to.”
Roberts said Snell “certainly” would not be throwing off a mound this coming week. He also said he didn’t think Snell would pitch in games during the exhibition season.
Whatever time Snell misses could jeopardize his individual goals. But he could still have a “perfect” season.
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