Johan Santana: a Case in Peak Value

In February 2008, when the New York Mets traded four players to the Minnesota Twins for Johan Santana, it looked like they were trading for a future Hall of Fame pitcher. Santana had just completed a five-year run with the Twins in which he won two Cy Young Awards while going 82-35 with a 2.92 ERA. As the trade was being consummated, Santana was instantly rewarded with a six-year, $137.5 million contract, at the time the biggest contract for a pitcher in the history of baseball.

After a terrific 2008 campaign (in which he finished 3rd in the N.L. Cy Young Award voting), the Mets did not get their money’s worth. He had two solid but not spectacular seasons, missed all of 2011 due to shoulder surgery, returned in 2012, and then pitched the first and only no-hitter in the franchise’s history.

Johan Santana: New York Mets Legend Forever

Unless you’re a Mets fan, you really can’t comprehend what a big deal it was when Santana completed the no-no. This is a franchise that had been in existence for over 50 years, a franchise with a long list of superb hurlers, and yet its fans never had experienced the joy of the completion of one of baseball’s greatest individual feats. Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Mike Scott, Dwight Gooden, and David Cone all tossed no-hitters in their careers but they did it in the uniforms of other teams in the years after their tenure in Queens had ended.

Santana’s gem was on Saturday, June 2 and I was on a business trip (in San Francisco). I was in a sports bar and I was hanging on every pitch. I couldn’t hear the audio (the bar was playing music) but the ongoing graphics told me what I needed to know. Santana’s pitch count was climbing into an uncomfortable level for a pitcher who was coming off shoulder surgery. He walked five batters while striking out eight in the game and finished with 134 pitches thrown. When he completed the game, striking out the Cardinals’ David Freese on a 3-2 change-up, the patrons in the bar (most of whom were not Mets fans and had likely never heard of Johan Santana) still celebrated with me because no-hitters are fun!

Terry Collins, the Mets’ manager at the time, is still haunted by the question about whether leaving him in for all of those pitches destroyed his career. It’s impossible to know the answer to that question but Santana pitched only ten more times that season (and in his career). In those last ten starts (after the no-hitter), he posted an 8.27 ERA.

Nobody would have thought about 134 pitches twenty or thirty years ago but in this, the pitch count era, it’s a big number, more pitches than any other pitcher threw in the entire major leagues in 2012. Santana was only 33 years old when he threw his final MLB pitch in 2012. He attempted several comebacks but was never been able to get back on a major league mound.

Because he never pitched in the major leagues after 2012, Johan Santana was on the 2018 Hall of Fame ballot at the young age of 38. On a ballot stacked with talent and voters limited to 10 selections, Santana received just 2.4% of the vote. This means that he will not have another chance at Cooperstown until 2030 when he has the potential to be considered by the Eras Committee (formerly known as the Veterans Committee).

Despite his poor performance on his lone BBWAA ballot appearance, Johan Santana does have a legitimate Hall of Fame case based on peak value.

Cooperstown Cred: Johan Santana (SP)

• Minnesota Twins (2000-2007), New York Mets (2008-2010, 2012)
• Career: 139-78 (.641), 3.20 ERA
• 136 ERA+  (13th best in MLB history with a minimum of 1,500 IP)
• Led league in ERA three times and strikeouts three times
• 2-time A.L. Cy Young Award winner (finished top 5 three other times)
• 51.1 career WAR (Wins Above Replacement)
• 4-time All-Star
• Pitched first no-hitter in New York Mets history in final MLB season (2012)

(cover photo: Pinterest)

This is an updated version of a piece originally posted in September 2017. 

Career Highlights: Johan Santana

Born in Tovar, Venezuela, Santana was originally signed by the Houston Astros in 1995 at the age of 16. After a few lackluster seasons in the low minor leagues with an ERA over 5.00, Santana was exposed to the Rule 5 draft, picked up by the Florida Marlins, and traded on the same day to the Twins for a minor league pitcher and cash.

By rule, as a Rule 5 player, the Twins had to keep the young left-hander on their major league roster for the entire season. He made his big league debut with the Twins in April 2000 at the age of 21. After one relief appearance, Santana made three mediocre-to-terrible starts and spent the rest of the season as a mop-up man (as evidenced by the team’s 2-28 record in his appearances).

After another pedestrian campaign, Santana opened the 2002 season in the minor leagues, where he worked to perfect his changeup, which would turn his career around. He returned to the majors at the end of May and was immediately a force to be reckoned with. Santana would bounce back and forth from the rotation to the bullpen until finally establishing himself as a starting pitcher after the 2003 All-Star break.

Johan Santana’s Best Five Seasons (2004-08)

During Santana’s best five campaigns (2004-2008), he won two Cy Young Awards and finished in the top five the other three times. Among pitchers tossing 750 innings (an average of 150 per season), he led the majors in WAR, ERA, wins, strikeouts, batting average against, OPS against, and WHIP (walks + hits per 9 innings). And he led most of those categories by significant margins. Simply put, he was by far the best pitcher in baseball for these five years.

In the modern game of baseball (since 1901), only 19 pitchers have ever had a consecutive five-year stretch in which they posted a WAR of 35 or greater (an average of 7 “Wins Above Replacement” per season) with an ERA+ of 150 or greater (meaning they were at least 50% better than the average hurler). Santana is one of those 19 pitchers.

A note here: there are several pitchers on this list who had multiple five-year runs of a 35+ WAR (Wins Above Replacement) and a 150+ ERA+. This chart simply shows their best five-year stretch as ranked by WAR. To keep the list relatively short we started with Sandy Koufax in the 1960s.

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(By the way, I didn’t show them here but there are only 9 pitchers who achieved this five-year feat prior to 1960 and all 9 are in the Hall of Fame).

The pitchers on this list (from 1960 to the current game) are in the Hall of Fame except for Santana, Kershaw (who is still active), Clemens (excluded due to PED use), and Kevin Brown, the one name you’re probably surprised to see on the list. After a mediocre start to his career, Brown became a dominant ace when he joined the Florida Marlins in 1996. He was good enough in two seasons with the Marlins (plus a year in San Diego in 1998) that, at the age of 33, he was signed to a seven-year, $105 million free-agent contract with the Dodgers, becoming the sport’s first $100 million player. Brown was also named in the Mitchell Report on PEDs, which might help explain his paltry 2.1% vote on the Hall of Fame ballot on his first (and now only) year of eligibility.

Johan Santana Compared to Hall of Fame Hurlers with Limited Innings

Anyway, because of his shoulder troubles, Johan Santana finished his career with just 2,025 innings pitched. There are only three comparable starting pitchers who are enshrined in Cooperstown, the only three who made the Hall of Fame as starters with less than 2,500 career innings thrown.

One of them would only be known to a hardcore fan: Addie Joss, who died at the age of 31 in 1911 after a brief but brilliant career with the Cleveland Naps.

One of them is likely familiar to many fans: St. Louis Cardinals ace Dizzy Dean, who only tossed 59 innings after turning 30 but had a spectacular run in his twenties, most notably when he went 30-7 with a 2.66 ERA in 1934, when he earned MVP honors and a World Series ring.

The third is one of the greatest legends in baseball history and you might laugh at loud that I’m putting him in comparison to Santana: I’m talking about the Dodgers’ lefty Sandy Koufax, who retired shortly before his 31st birthday due to his chronically ailing left elbow.

Here are the numbers of this quartet, side by side.

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First of all, let’s state plainly that Santana is not in Koufax’s league. As good as Santana was compared to the rest of the league during his peak, Koufax was better. He won 3 Cy Youngs to Santana’s 2. He won an MVP trophy. He tossed four no-hitters (including a perfect game) to Santana’s lone no-no. And Koufax won three World Series titles, earning MVP honors twice. In Los Angeles’ two titles of ’63 and ’65, The Left Arm of God went 4-1 with a 0.86 ERA in five starts.

But when you compare Santana to Addie Joss, he looks pretty darned close. Yes, Joss had a vastly superior ERA but that’s because he pitched in the dead-ball era. This is why we use ERA+, which adjusts for the overall offensive era in which a pitcher toed the rubber. Using that metric, Santana is really close.

Because of his untimely death (of meningitis), Joss only pitched for 9 seasons in the majors. In 1978 the Veterans Committee chose to waive the usual ten-season minimum requirement and elected him to the Hall of Fame.

A statistical comparison of Santana to Dean also is favorable to the Venezuelan left-hander. He had a higher WAR and park-and-era adjusted ERA+ and only 11 fewer wins despite pitching in the bullpen-dominated 2000s. Dean was elected to the Hall of Fame (by the BBWAA) in 1953. His 150 career wins are the fewest of any starting pitcher with a plaque in Cooperstown.

What makes a case for Santana so hard is that he won just 139 games in his career, which was less than Dean’s 150 and would be the fewest of any starting pitcher in the Hall. But at some point Hall of Fame voters (and future versions of the Veterans Committee) are going to need to look at pitcher wins differently. Starting pitchers run deep pitch counts much earlier in the game than in yesteryear because opposing offenses now know how important it is to do this, to work counts, foul balls off, to be just as happy with a walk as a hit. So pitchers just don’t get credit for as many wins because the bullpen plays a bigger and bigger role every year. we need to re-evaluate the traditional benchmarks and not ask pitchers with less than 200 career wins to be as good as Sandy Koufax.

Final Thoughts

Let me finish with this. First, one of the things most Hall of Famers shares in common is a dominance of their position of about 7 years, longer than the 5-year peak we shared before. Look at how Johan Santana compares to his peers from 2004-2010, his best four years in Minnesota, and his first three seasons in New York. On this table, I’m using criteria of a minimum of 1,200 IP.

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No matter how you measure it, Johan Santana was the best pitcher in baseball for those seven seasons. If you stretch it out to 8 seasons (2003-2010), he’s still at the top of virtually every one of those categories (including WAR, ERA+, WHIP, and BAA). For many Hall of Fame players, it’s good enough to have a seven or eight-year peak of this kind of dominance even if the rest of your career was sub-par.

Unfortunately, Santana didn’t have a second half of his career. That lone 2012 season, in which he made New York Mets history with that no-hitter, was the only season after his 31st birthday in which he was able to take the hill. And so his time on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot lasted just one year.

If a future version of the Veterans Committee starts inducting players at the rate of those inducted from the first half of the 20th century then Johan Santana will be in the Hall of Fame eventually.

What’s absolutely true is that Hall of Fame voters will at some point have to adjust their “minimum wins” criteria, lowering the bar for the long-term statistical compilers and also for those like Santana who didn’t last long but were the best of their craft while they toed the rubber.

Thanks for reading. Please follow Cooperstown Cred on Twitter @cooperstowncred.

Chris Bodig