Snell shaken after hitting Harper with pitch

SAN DIEGO — For four innings on Saturday night, Blake Snell was the very version of himself the Padres have been waiting for. He threw his fastball for strikes. His breaking pitches seemed untouchable. Snell was efficient and electric — the way he looked late last season, the way he looked when he was Cy Young Blake Snell in 2018.

“That,” manager Bob Melvin would say afterward, “might be the best stuff we’ve seen from him all year.”

And then, with one out in the fourth inning, Snell threw a 2-2 fastball to Bryce Harper, and it got away from the left-hander, up and in. The pitch caught Harper’s left thumb, square, at 97.2 mph. The Phillies’ superstar was later diagnosed with a fracture. Snell quickly completed the fourth inning with a double-play grounder, but he came unglued in the fifth.

“It definitely rattled me a little bit,” Snell confessed after the Padres’ 4-2 loss to the Phillies at Petco Park. “I went out there, and I was starting off at-bats with balls, not as aggressive, not attacking the zone, like I was. It definitely changed the game a little bit.”

Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto led off the fifth inning with a homer, and Snell allowed two more runs in the frame. He surrendered another in the sixth. As dominant as he’d been for four innings, Snell again found himself on the wrong end of a decision, dropping to 0-5 on the season, with the Padres having lost all seven of his starts.

“The results obviously make me pretty angry, with how they’ve been,” Snell said. “But I’ve been locating the ball. I’m in the zone more. I’m getting ahead a lot better. Everything’s getting better. The results aren’t showing that. So it’s really frustrating.”

Making matters worse, the Padres’ rotation runs seven-deep, with six pitchers who currently boast sub-4 ERAs. Then there’s Snell, who spent a month and a half on the injured list and now has a 5.60 ERA.

The Padres remain confident that, at some point this season, Snell will join the party. He might even be the life of it. It was only last season that Snell endured similar struggles in the first half, only to break out as the Padres’ most dominant pitcher in August and early September. 

“I thought tonight was the day he was going to roll,” Melvin said. “He just had one off inning — the leadoff homer, and they nicked him up for a couple runs. But I think he’s really close because today’s stuff was as good as we’ve seen all year.”

To be fair, Snell’s poor record isn’t entirely his own doing. The Padres have given him very little in the way of run support. Without the injured Manny Machado in the starting lineup, they struggled to support him once again. 

Offensively, the Padres are clearly starting to feel the effects of life without Machado. They’ve scored five runs in three games against Philadelphia this weekend. On Saturday night, both runs came courtesy of Jorge Alfaro’s two-run double in the fifth. But the Phillies responded with a run in the sixth to widen the lead to two runs, and the Padres never got any closer.

After the game, Alfaro marveled at just how sharp Snell had been over those first few innings. He induced 14 swings and misses with his breaking pitches, including a whopping nine on 24 curveballs.

“His breaking balls were moving so it was even hard to block,” Alfaro said. “I can’t imagine facing that guy today.”

That’s how good Snell was in the early part of the game. Then he plunked Harper. Then he struggled.

Whether those two were related, Snell isn’t quite sure. But he knows he was definitely “rattled.”

In the moment, Harper reacted angrily, barking at Snell. (Though it appeared that even through the agony of a broken thumb, Harper acknowledged that he realized it wasn’t intentional). After the game, the two exchanged text messages. 

“He knows how I feel,” Snell said. “Obviously, I felt terrible hitting him. I just don’t do that, and he knows that. We’ve talked; we’ve handled it. It was never anything. It’s just emotional. He plays with a lot of passion, and I can understand why he’d be upset. I’m just as upset as he is. I hit him; I don’t hit people. I just hope he recovers quickly and gets back out there and continues to compete.”