Blake Snell, Tampa Bay Rays
March/April Stats: 2-2 record with a 37.5% strikeout rate, 5.8% walk rate, 2.54 ERA, 2.54 SIERA, and 0.7 fWAR in 28.1 innings
The reigning AL Cy Young Award winner has pretty much picked up where he left off last season, but with more strikeouts. And while the following tweet is outdated since Snell took the hill Tuesday night, it still shows how great he’s been in 2019.
Highest Rate of Misses on Swings – 2019 Season
Blake Snell 41% **
Luis Castillo 34% **
Stephen Strasburg 33%
Max Scherzer 33%
Gerrit Cole 33% **** Starts tonight (Snell, Castillo, Cole)
— SIS (@SportsInfo_SIS) April 30, 2019
As we mentioned last week, Snell’s increased curveball usage has been a huge part of the shift in his quality-of-contact numbers (28.8% soft-hit rate, 23.7% hard-hit rate). He’s actually been even more dominant as a visitor (0.75 ERA in 12 road innings) than he has at the Trop (3.86 ERA in 16.1 innings).
About Matt Musico
Matt Musico currently manages Chin Music Baseball and contributes to The Sports Daily. His past work has been featured at numberFire, Yahoo! Sports and Bleacher Report. He’s also written a book and created an online class about how to get started as a sports blogger. You can sign up for his email newsletter here.
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