Left-hander Blake Snell has exercised the opt-out provision in his contract and is now a free agent. Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic was among those to relay the news on X.
The news is not at all surprising. Snell was a free agent a year ago and didn’t find the contract he was seeking, despite the fact that he was coming off a Cy Young campaign in 2023.
He eventually signed with the Giants on a two-year pact with a $62M guarantee. That came in the form of a $15M salary and a $17M signing bonus for 2024, with a $30M salary for 2025 if Snell stayed.
The opt-out after the first year was there to give Snell a chance to take another shot at free agency if he could stay healthy and engineer another strong season in 2024.
For a while, it seemed like that wasn’t going to come to pass. Perhaps since he didn’t sign until the middle of March and had a delayed spring training, he stumbled out of the gate in 2024 and also suffered a few injuries. At the end of June, he was on the injured list for the second time, the first one labeled as a left adductor strain and the second as a left groin strain. He had a 9.51 earned run average in the six starts he was able to make.
But he came back shortly after that and was completely dominant the rest of the way. He posted a 1.23 ERA in his final 14 starts of the year. His 10% walk rate was a tad high but he struck out 38.1% of batters faced.
Snell has had a few injury absences over the years but has continually demonstrated himself to be one of the best pitchers on the planet when on the mound. From 2018 until the present day, he has a 3.03 ERA and 32.1% strikeout rate, both of which are top ten numbers among qualified starters for that stretch. Among pitchers with at least 250 innings pitched over the past two years, only Tarik Skubal has a lower ERA than Snell’s 2.57 mark. Snell’s 32.7% strikeout rate in that time is also second best, a hair below Tyler Glasnow’s 32.8% rate.
Given that elite performance, it was widely expected that Snell would return to free agency in the hopes of finding a more robust market this time around. He will be one of the top starting pitchers available alongside Corbin Burnes, Max Fried and Jack Flaherty. Snell is leaving $30M on the table but should be able to blow past that with a nine-figure deal of some kind.
