BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!



Blake Snell’s alarm goes off at 8 a.m. inside his childhood home in Seattle. He reaches for a polo and grabs the closest pair of khaki pants he can find — the standard uniform for a marina dockhand.



It’s a random weekday in December 2011, several months after Snell was selected by the Rays in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft. He had just turned 19. Or it could’ve been sometime in January 2016, only a few months before Snell made his big-league debut.



The days in between those years all blend in for him. They consisted of 40-plus-hour weeks working at Elliott Bay Marina in Seattle during the offseason. He wasn’t doing it for the extra money — Snell signed for $684,000 after he was drafted No. 52 overall in 2011.



“I literally was, like, the bitch,” Snell says. “I did dock walks and cleaned all the shit off the docks and boats. I made...