Dodgers have luxury to not sweat Blake Snell’s absence

PHOENIX — On any other team, Blake Snell would be the story of camp.

The two-time Cy Young Award winner hasn’t delivered a single pitch off a mound in spring training, as he is taking a conservative approach in returning from a shoulder injury. His manager said the chances of him being ready for Opening Day are “probably zero.” 

Snell declined to offer any insight into his situation when approached Saturday morning.

“No,” he said before marching out of the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ clubhouse.

Not to make too much of a player refusing to speak to the media — Snell wasn’t particularly loquacious in camp last year — but is Snell’s refusal to speak a sign of frustration?

“I think that he wants to be healthy,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “He wants to be out there. I guess for me, there’s probably not a whole lot [for him] to say. He’s not on the mound right now. He’s not in games. The odds of him starting this season are probably zero. So, I think for him, it’s like he needs to do his work to get back on the field.”

The timeline for him to do so has already changed. Two weeks before reporting to spring training, Snell was asked at the team’s fan fest whether he would be ready for Opening Day.

“That’s the plan,” he said.

His unavailability at the start of the season isn’t much of a concern for the Dodgers, who can easily survive a month or two without him. Last season, they didn’t have him for four months, and his August return sufficiently prepared him 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 figure they should be able to navigate the regular season with a deep rotation anchored by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Glasnow.

Snell has said he’s on board with ramping up slowly, but his lack of durability has been a sensitive subject for him in the past. He’s a two-time Cy Young Award winner who has never logged a 200-inning season or made an All-Star team. He has a reputation for not pitching deep into games.

The reputation bothered him enough to address it right 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 doesn’t go into the ninth. He doesn’t go into the eighth.’ Just did it. Leave me alone.”

Snell pitched in only 104 innings for the Giants that season. In his first season with the Dodgers the following season, he pitched only 61 ⅓.

But at the team’s fan fest, Snell called his first season with the Dodgers “perfect.”

“We won the World Series,” he said.

On the way there, he was a workhorse. 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 of last year he was on a new team, he pushed through things to start the season healthy, which is understandable,” Roberts said. “And you learn from it. He was never right all year. 

“I think that 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 do think he feels comfort in knowing that we need him, we count on him, we believe in him. Then there’s the individual part where I do think that he wants to get another Cy Young [Award], and what that means is you gotta be healthy, you gotta make starts. That’s something that personally he’s striving for.”

Roberts said Snell wouldn’t throw off a mound in the next week “for sure.” He also said he didn’t think Snell would pitch in any games in the exhibition season.

Whatever time Snell misses could compromise his individual goals. But he could still have another “perfect” season.

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