It was hard not to feel a sense of betrayal when Blake Snell signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers after spending the 2024 season with the San Francisco Giants. It was even tougher to watch him dominate
in the early rounds of the playoffs, beating the Cincinnati Reds and blanking the Philadelphia Phillies and Milwaukee Brewers. Snell’s first three playoff starts saw him give up only six hits and two runs in 21 innings, with 28 strikeouts and only five walks. He was 3-0 with a 0.86 ERA, allowing runs in just one inning.
But in the World Series, Snell has given back to Giants fans who may have resented him for signing with their rivals. Snell gave up five runs in 6 2/3 innings in the Dodgers’ 6-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays, the last coming in a disastrous 7th inning where he and Edgardo Henriquez couldn’t get the ball over the plate and catcher Will Smith couldn’t handle their wild pitches.
It’s Snell’s second World Series start where he gave up five runs, though he hasn’t been helped by his bullpen. Henriquez wild-pitched in a run in relief, then gave up an RBI single. In Game 1, Snell left with the bases loaded and the score tied 2-2, only to see Emmet Sheehan let all three inherited runners score before Anthony Banda gave up the first pinch-hit grand slam on World Series history.
Snell is a dominant strikeout pitcher, but his biggest weakness is that he walks a lot of hitters. This year, in a season where injuries limited Snell to just 11 starts, he had the lowest home run rate of his career (0.4 per 9 innings) after giving up only 0.5 per 9 with the Giants.
In Game 5, that trend lasted only three pitches.
Davis Schneider hit Snell’s first pitch over the left field wall, and Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. did the same to Snell’s third pitch. It got worse for Snell later, when Teoscar Hernandez’s attempted diving catch gifted the Blue Jays a triple and led to a run, but the two early runs would have been enough on a night where the Dodgers had just two hits that left the infield.
But Snell insisted that the Blue Jays had not gotten to him in Game 5 — it was just luck.
Luck plays in baseball, and so do the Dodgers and Blue Jays on Halloween night, when another departed Giants pitcher, Kevin Gausman, takes the mound. In Gausman’s case, the Giants never offered him a contract, just like when Brandon Belt headed to the Blue Jays in 2024. He’ll face Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a rumored Giants free-agent target who never signed, like so many before him.
Yamamoto will be tough to beat, after his masterful complete-game victory in Game 2, where he gave up only four hits and struck out 8. Gausman matched him for six innings, but gave up home runs to Max Muncy and Will Smith in the 7th. Blake Snell would say that was just bad luck, so it’s anyone’s game!
