by Cary Osborne
The swings will tell you.
And they were telling Blake Snell early on Saturday that his stuff was nasty.
The second inning was very telling.
Toronto shortstop Bo Bichette took a half hack and struck out on a curveball. Alejando Kirk missed on a changeup and landed on one knee. Daulton Varsho was overpowered on an explosive four-seamer, swinging off his back foot and missing.
But Ernie Clement’s swing in the third inning was the one.
The Blue Jays second baseman swung on a changeup and the bat went flying into the back end of the Dodger dugout next to the camera well. He was Snell’s seventh strikeout out of the nine outs Snell recorded to that point.
Snell struck out 10 batters in his five innings and didn’t allow a run. Nine batters struck out swinging in the Dodgers’ 9–1 win.
Snell, though, found some things to pick at.
“It’s good. It’s getting better. Just need to command the fastball better. Get ahead,” he said. “Still a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of things I can do better and help me get deeper into the game. But overall I’m feeling healthy and excited about that.”
https://medium.com/media/73beb0d749485b72494347253ee6192d/href
The deeper counts and 50 pitches thrown in the third and fourth innings drove Snell’s pitch count up. At 90 pitches after five innings, he was done.
But the five-inning outing was the first display of dominance for the two-time Cy Young Award winner as a Dodger at Dodger Stadium.
This was Snell’s first start at Dodger Stadium since April 2. He went on the injured list four days later with left shoulder inflammation, and he missed the next four months of the Major League season.
The left-hander returned Aug. 2 and allowed three runs over five innings, striking out eight in Tampa Bay in a hard-luck loss.
He has now struck out 18 batters in his 10 innings since returning from the injured list. He has 37 swinging strikes in the two games.
His 19 swinging strikes on Aug. 2 are tied for third-most by a Dodger pitcher in a game this season. His 18 on Saturday are tied for fifth-most.
“The stuff was really good,” said manager Dave Roberts. “Obviously, this is a team that doesn’t strike out very much. They put the ball in play. So it just speaks to how good Blake’s stuff was. I think every everything was on — the fastball, the changeup, the curve ball.”
Snell was on it from the first pitch on Saturday. He struck out the first two batters he faced on six pitches. He struck out six Blue Jays in the team’s first turn around the order.
He was a ball away from walking the bases loaded in the fourth inning, but struck out third baseman Buddy Kennedy on a changeup to end the frame scoreless.
While he had the Blue Jays in a sleeper hold, the Dodger offense unloaded in the middle innings.
Max Muncy started things with a two-run homer in the bottom of the fourth. Shohei Ohtani hit a solo homer in the fifth. The Dodgers added six runs in the sixth.
https://medium.com/media/4a5f7f72056354a3402be86b2e28e308/href
Dalton Rushing, Mookie Betts and Andy Pages each had two-RBI hits.
Ohtani’s homer was №40 this season. It’s his third straight season with at least 40 home runs. It’s his fourth in five seasons.
Ohtani has five hits in the first two games of this series against the American League’s top team — now both Dodger wins.
https://medium.com/media/e545eed18948d478275a6e8c2781e201/href
Blake Snell makes his dominance felt at Dodger Stadium was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.