5:45PM: The Padres have officially announced the moves, putting Snell on the 10-day IL (retroactive to April 11) with a left adductor strain.
3:49PM: Padres manager Bob Melvin told reporters (including AJ Cassavell and Kevin Acee) that Snell has been placed on the 10-day IL, and Gore will indeed start Friday’s game.
12:33PM: The Padres are facing some early-season uncertainty in the starting rotation. Left-hander Blake Snell was scratched from what was supposed to be his first start on Sunday after experiencing adductor tightness. Snell hasn’t been placed on the injured list, but it’s expected he’ll need some time on the shelf to recover.
With Snell’s spot in the rotation up again tomorrow night against the Braves, it looks as if MacKenzie Gore will get his first big league look. AJ Cassavell of MLB.com tweeted Tuesday that Gore had joined the team’s taxi squad, and Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote last night the organization expects to soon place Snell on the IL and start Gore in his place.
Gore’s prospect stock has fluctuated considerably in recent seasons. The third overall pick in 2017, he carved up low minors hitters over his first two professional campaigns. In the process, Gore emerged as a potentially elite young talent. Heading into the 2020 season, each of Baseball America, FanGraphs and The Athletic slotted Gore as the sport’s top pitching prospect. All three outlets ranked him among the top six minor league talents overall.
Having reached Double-A late in 2019, Gore looked as if he could make his MLB debut at some point that season. The pandemic wound up necessitating a shorter schedule and a lack of minor league play, however, and Gore spent the year at the alternate training site. Reports emerged that he’d gotten out of whack mechanically, with Baseball America writing over the 2020-21 offseason there were concerns about both his control and a velocity dip.
Those red flags persisted last year, as Gore walked an alarming 12.5% of opponents against a dramatically reduced 18.8% strikeout rate in six Triple-A starts. The Padres reassigned him to their Arizona complex for some lower-pressure work to get back on track, and he returned to an affiliate late in the season with a pair of Double-A starts. He walked another eight batters in nine innings but also punched out 16.
There’s no question Gore’s inconsistent past couple seasons have dealt some kind of hit to his prospect stock. He’s no longer a consensus top ten minor leaguer, nor has he reached the majors as quickly as it had once seemed he would. Yet Gore only turned 23 years old in February and is only two years removed from being perhaps the best pitcher in the minors. He’s certainly still a legitimate prospect, one whom Keith Law of the Athletic slotted #59 overall this offseason.
Law wrote that each of Gore’s fastball, changeup and slider are still plus pitches and that he’s athletic enough to yet emerge as a top-of-the-rotation arm if he finds more mechanical consistency. BA slotted the southpaw fourth in the San Diego system this winter, praising his high-octane repertoire and noting that his “misses off the plate were much smaller” late last year than they’d been early in that season. Gore has only made one appearance so far this year, but he didn’t issue a single free pass in five scoreless innings with Triple-A El Paso last week, fanning seven of the 16 batters he faced.
Gore is already on the 40-man roster, so a Snell IL placement would be sufficient to accommodate his call-up. How long he’d remain in the rotation is to be seen, but Acee writes that both Snell and right-hander Mike Clevinger are expected to require two minor league rehab starts before returning to the majors. The team announced last night that Clevinger, who missed all of last season recovering from Tommy John surgery and opened this year on the IL due to some soreness in his right knee, will make his first rehab start today with High-A Lake Elsinore.
In honor of the Florida Fire Frogs (RIP), the Padres should become the *FRESNO FIRE FROGS.
Where’s the down vote
Unfortunately the downvote will probably never come back.
I wanna downvote the downvotes.
F in the chat for the Fire Frogs
Miss the Fire Frogs. Best bang for yer buck in central FL.
I do not get how some of these teams, Padres, Mets, Yankees, can get so banged up, so often… it makes no sense, and it’s awful for the game.
I’d have to think it’s something that their training staffs are doing. Some players just have more durability issues than others and there’s definitely some bad luck involved, but some of these teams have this problem every year and at some point it’s more than a coincidence.
You’ve definitely got something there because we’ve seen this with the Mets for more than just a few years recently, and now SD it seems is placing someone on the IL about every other day. Teams generally mimic other organizations who have solid results in certain areas, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. CLE, for example, has minimal IL placements the past few seasons (at least since Kipnis and Chisenhall departed) which you would think make a GM say, “Hey, somebody figure out what they’re doing, and we’ll try it because our program clearly ain’t working.”
Cleveland? They who wore out Clevinger’s arm then traded their damaged goods to the Pads.
But they didn’t suffer the consequences. Buyer beware……just like with Kluber. Like TB, they know when a player is on the cusp of a breakdown. I believe SD has one of theirs as well in Blake Snell.
Snell was hurt every year of his career except 2018. Take out 2018 and his career ERA when the Padres traded for him was just under 4 and he had averaged less than 5 IP per start.
Everyone has a career year that they never repeat. That was 2018 for Snell. Preller should have known what he was trading for.
If Snell hadn’t won the Cy Young, he doesn’t fetch Patiño, Mejia, Wilcox, and Hunt.
He was always talented, but extremely frustrating to watch. 2018 was Blake Snell getting out of the way of Blake Snell. In other words, the mental aspect of the game came together. He got out of his head, and he had the season of his career. I really hope he can get back into that mindset that helped in 2018, because watching him work was like watching an artist perform. We caught a glimpse of his Cy Young form during game 6 of the 2020 WS. I’d love to see him like that again.
Thank you Johnny Superscout
Frankie montas for CJ Abrams, who says no?
Last I checked glass tatis jr is still out… forever?
You’d have to throw in Langeliers and Muncy just to get our attention…
Would you like fries with that Asfan?
Padres for sure, they wouldn’t include him in a trade for Reynolds who has 4 years of control.
I dont think the padres are pursing any more starting pitching unless they plan on trading some of it.
They need outfielders.
Pads
Padres
Lake Elsinore is Low A, not High A
It was high A when Gore pitched there. The recent reorganization when MLB took over the minors relegated them to Low A.
Lake Elsinore is HIGH A.
No, dude. Lake Elsinore is Low-A. Fort Wayne is now High-A. It would take you about four seconds to look it up. Try and keep up, your information is obsolete.
some teams approach starting pitching the way some countries approached putting someone atop Mt Everest in the 1960s. Throw enough bodies at it and eventually they pile up high enough that you reach the top.
Fun series in SF, amigo… congrats to your Gigantes for taking 2 of 3.
I’m really torn when they play each other. On paper the Giants’ lineup doesn’t look very formidable!
They’re like the ‘88 Dodgers. You look at their roster and realize it was nothing short of a miracle they won it all. Maybe the Giants are doing it with smoke and mirrors, but they’re doing it.
especially the Bulgarians, btw
Will be great to see what gore can do. If he is truly ready to step in every 5th day it will make it easier for the padres to package some pitching and go get another bat or two which they need desperately.
The Padres always seem to be on the uphill climb. Last year when it seems they would be WS contenders, the Giants pull off one of the best seasons in club history (to stay in front of the Dodgers). Add to that multiple injuries, esp to their pitchers, and you get not even a playoff game. Fire the manager, bring in one of best in the game, and Tatis goes down. Now more pitching injuries. They need a Jobu doll or something…
Someone get a bucket of KFC in the Pads clubhouse ASAP.
Nah, they’re going to need a live chicken
The injuries to the pitchers had such an impact because we had no depth. None. We were having bullpen games in April! And the best Preller could do was to sign Arrieta and Vasquez.
Up your butt, Jobu…
Snell and clevinger both will be back soon. Meanwhile they still have darvish, manaea, mustgrove, Martinez and soon to be gore. They are fine still in starting pitching.
Gore’s control and stuff looked really good in spring training as well as his aaa start. Velocity was reported up to 98-99, sitting around 95-96. I think he is gonna be a stud. We shall see Friday when he makes his first start.
Darvish is probably injured as well judging from his last outing. Going to take more than one start to know if Gore is a stud, but I agree with you that he should turn into one over time. He is exceptionally talented.
It’s hard to not get too excited about Gore. But, let’s remember that all he’s had is a few good innings in ST, and one good AAA start over the last couple of years.
He’ll be a stud, but the list of guys who dominate from their ML debut forward is very short. I can only think of one — Valenzuela.
Dwight Gooden
276.2 IP, 8 complete game shutouts and 16 complete games in 1985
So filthy
Yes, Gooden is another. And he was only 19!
Cy Young, Bob Gibson, Clayton Kershaw…
One of these guys is recent and extremely similar to Gore.
I liked the Kershaw comp once upon a time. people forget that Kershaw had a so so rookie year but he was 20. he’s been dominating big league hitters since he was 21. Gore is already several years behind that very unfair comparison
Kershaw was fairly pedestrian his rooke year.
I’d really, really temper my expectations with clevinger, both with his quality and availability
Folks need to stop thinking of the CLE version of Clevinger. If he produces like that ever again I’ll be surprised. One thing he brought to baseball that makes me cringe every time I see a pitcher emulate it is that leg whip. Unfortunately the only way to break a pitcher from doing that is a line drive to the a$$.
Gore is another example of how extreme fan reaction can be to small sample sizes. After a few games in the minors he was can’t miss, then last year he had no value to fans and bringing him up would get you laughed at. Now he’s back on top because of a hot start. I hope he keeps it up
Mike Piazza Pie:
Gore was deemed “can’t miss” because of 4 Plus pitches…a couple plus plus,before he ever had any Minor League success.
This just in….he still has these pitches.
He may have the pitches, but they COMPLETELY changed his delivery. Why do you think he struggled the last 2+ years?
They changed his delivery because his old delivery wasn’t working. It’s hard to be consistently accurate when you kick your lead leg 6+ feet in the air and take a 7.5 foot stride. Niebla changed his delivery and made it far more efficient. He made it much easier to perform and repeat. Making it easy to repeat makes Gore far more accurate with all of his pitches. It even added a few mph with the increased efficiency. How can that be anything but good?
He certainly didn’t look intimidated last night by the WS champs
@Javia135 …
Nice try, but Niebla didn’t change Gore’s delivery. They started changing it more than two years ago. His old delivery made him a first round draft pick, and he had excellent control. They changed it to make it more efficient and take away some injury risk.
Thats some.run Preller is on with SP last 2-3 years So it’s just a matter of time before Manaea breaks.
Its a 15 day IL for pitchers isn’t it? Or does that not start until May 2nd?
10 day IL for now.
You’re correct! Non-concussed pitchers get the 10 Day until May 2nd, then it becomes the 15 Day for the rest of the season. Furthermore, on May 2nd the rosters will drop to 26 from the current 28 as well.
This dudes gonna get rocked
I’m sure that’s why everyone has been trying to trade for him, right?
Both things can be true.
Just a feeling so sorry my opinions not the same as yours !!
You have your opinion. I have mine. No whining necessary.
So….just a gut feeling, that’s it?
Not the first time around. With the exception of the Reds’ Lodolo last night, a SP making his debut is usually successful because the opposition has never seen him, so let’s see where he is on 6/1.
Unless he absolutely dominates Gore will get 2-5 starts and then be back in the minors. Both Snell and Clevinger are experienced major league starters making major league salaries. They will both be back in a couple of weeks. With Musgrove, Manea, Darvish, Martinez, Clevinger and Snell ahead of him he is the #7 starter. I don’t see him staying.
Padres are smoking the Braves here is SD tonight. Great night for a game and a butt whooping!