Article: Red Sox Free Agent Tracker: Blake Snell

[Brandon Glick]

The Red Sox have taken a meeting with Snell, winner of the 2023 NL and 2018 AL Cy Young Award. Is he the right pitcher to front the rotation?

Before diving into anything here, let’s acknowledge something. Blake Snell’s profile will remind a lot of people of another former Tampa Bay lefty who won the Cy Young award for the Rays and later came to the Red Sox: David Price. Price was utterly brilliant in Florida, maintained his elite performance in Detroit, and then settled in as a solid but unspectacular veteran with the Red Sox (and later, the Dodgers).

The issue was that as Price’s performance declined, his price tag escalated. He signed a seven-year, $217-million contract with Boston in 2015, which was the largest contract for a pitcher in baseball history until Stephen Strasburg came along (talk about buyer’s remorse). Eventually, Boston got the Dodgers to eat most of the final few years of Price’s deal as part of the ill-fated Mookie Betts contract.

Snell and Price may have had similar career journeys up this point, but they are vastly different pitchers. Price was heavily reliant on his sinker and cutter as his primary fastballs, mixing in the occasional changeup and curveball as his offspeed offerings. Snell threw his four-seam fastball a whopping 46% of the time last year, utilizing a changeup, curveball, and slider for the other half of his arsenal.

Snell’s career has been up-and-down to this point, with absurd highs (one of only seven pitchers to have won a Cy Young in both leagues), and middling lows (4.06 ERA in 285 ⅔ innings between 2019-21). However, he’s found the next gear over the past three seasons, with a 2.82 ERA (2.98 FIP) in 412.0 innings between the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants. His 32.5% strikeout rate is among the top marks in the league in that window, as is his .191 batting average against. He’s also done a significantly better job in recent years in limiting the long ball, and his home run percentage (that is, the percentage of all plate appearances in which he allowed a homer) was down to a career-low 1.4% mark in 2024. Though he obviously benefited from playing in spacious Oracle Park, his home run rates were also down across the board in his final few seasons in San Diego.

All that adds up to a pitcher who looks like a mighty fine target for the ace-starved Red Sox. Unlike other free agent aces — namely, Corbin Burnes and Max Fried — Snell doesn’t come attached to the qualifying offer this offseason, by virtue of having declined it following the 2023 season.

With Nick Pivetta declining his QO, the projected Red Sox rotation looks like this: Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, Bryan Bello, and Richard Fitts. The latter impressed in his cup of coffee at the end of this past season, and the first three are all established major-league arms, but none of those pitchers are Game 1 starters. Houck was a breakout star in 2024, but it remains to be seen how he holds up after he blew past his previous career-high in innings (178 2/3, previously 106). Lucas Giolito and Garrett Whitlock could return as contributors at some point, but they remain on the mend from UCL injuries.

Snell, who’s made 19 or more starts in every non-pandemic season of his career (and has eclipsed 100+ innings in seven consecutive full seasons), is the kind of pitcher the Red Sox need, especially since he’d add some much-needed southpaw diversity to a righty-dominated rotation.

And, as it turns out, the Red Sox front office agrees. Craig Breslow and company reportedly met with the 32-year-old this week, which should pique fans' interest after CEO Sam Kennedy’s claim that the team is willing to exceed the first threshold of the Competitive Balance Tax for the right players.

By all accounts, Snell is one of the right players. Even as he nears his mid-30s, he’s a strikeout artist with improving control and a diverse arsenal. He’s going to run any team that signs him more than $100 million, but he may be preferable to the other elite pitchers on the market thanks to his recent performance and detachment from the qualifying offer. For a team that just traded away 2024 NL Cy Young winner Chris Sale, the Red Sox badly need to bring an upper-echelon arm into their rotation this offseason. It’s hard to imagine a better fit than Snell…unless they can shock the world in the Roki Sasaki sweepstakes.

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