The final day of the first half was pretty spectacular for the Angels. Not only did the club best the Mariners to move into sole possession of first place in the AL West, they also gained a third All-Star when Hector Santiago was named to the squad to replace an exhausted Sonny Gray. Santiago is the first Angels pitcher to make the All-Star team since 2012, when Jered Weaver and C.J. Wilson both got nods, and is probably the last guy anyone expected to get an invitation to the midsummer classic when the year began.
As noted elsewhere, Santiago didn’t even have a sure spot in the rotation when camp opened in March. Had Andrew Heaney or Nick Tropeano put together a strong spring, we might be talking about how Santiago seemed to be improving as a long reliever/spot starter, but that it’s probably small sample size. Instead we have 108.1 innings of a 155 ERA+ to explain, which is much more difficult to write off. I tried my best to explain it away towards the end of May, when I suggested that Santiago and his “unsustainable” 2.47 ERA should be trade bait, but here we are nearly two months later and those numbers have only gotten better: his ERA and FIP are lower, his strike percentage is up, and his walk rate is down. There are career bests everywhere you look, and the left-hander hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down anytime soon.
So, then, Is it finally time to start sipping the Santiago Kool-Aid? Let’s dive in and find out.
The first thing to note is Santiago’s better-than-MLB-average walk rate of 7.6% this season, which represents a massive improvement over his career mark (10.9%) coming into the year. Control problems are what were supposed to relegate the southpaw to bullpen duty in the long run—and what did push him out of the rotation for a while—and what had some (i.e. me) dubbing him “C.J. Wilson, 2.0” after his inaugural season with the Halos. Now that he’s limiting free passes, though, Santiago and his extreme fly-ball ways look much more like vintage Jered Weaver than any iteration of Wilson.
The funny thing about Santiago’s improved control is that he isn’t throwing many more pitches in the actual strike zone than normal this season. His overall Zone% (52.2%) is actually slightly lower than it was last year (52.8%), when he walked 9.7% of the batters he faced. The reason his control numbers have improved despite marginally fewer pitches in the zone seems to be twofold:
1) He’s throwing more first-pitch strikes (59.2%) and getting into more 0-2 counts (28.5%) than ever, meaning he’s putting more hitters into a defensive mindset at the plate. Getting ahead in counts seems simple enough, but the positive effect it can have when done with any frequency is staggering. This year AL pitchers own a .957 OPS-against when behind in the count, vs. a .525 OPS-against when ahead—the split is almost identical for Santiago.
2) Relatedly, he’s getting more swings at pitches out of the zone (26.0%) than ever, which seems to imply that more of his offerings at least *look* like strikes out of his hand this season. One of the big issues with C.J. Wilson last year—and also somewhat with Huston Street this year—was that when he started missing the strike zone, he seemed to really miss it. These were pitches so bad that even Vlad Guerrero wouldn’t think about swinging at them; they didn’t look like strikes out of the hand, and they moved even farther from the zone as they got to the plate. There doesn’t seem to be any way to quantify these offerings as of yet (that I know of), so I’ve taken to calling them “lost pitches.” Everyone has pitches that get away from them now and again, but if too many of your pitches are of the “lost” variety, then hitters are going to stop swinging altogether until you groove one.
If, however, most of your pitches out of the zone are at least close to the plate, it stands to reason that batters would be more willing to offer at some of them, especially if they’re behind in the count. This is what I think Santiago is benefiting from this year. While his more compact, repeatable delivery hasn’t led to more pitches in the strike zone, it has seemed to narrow the amorphous area in which his pitches end up. In other words: when he misses it’s not by much, so batters are swinging more frequently.
The next thing to note is that the emergence of Santiago’s cutter has made him death against lefties. He’s always had an assortment of secondary pitches—sinker, curve, cutter, slider, screwball— but it wasn’t until this year that he really became more than a fastball/change guy. In his first three full seasons, four-seamers and change-ups accounted for 80% of all his pitches thrown—no other pitch eclipsed 9%. And for all the pitches in his arsenal, none was really a weapon against lefties. This year, his new-and-improved cutter has become a go-to third pitch (13.3%), and is the crux of the paltry .220 wOBA1 left-handed batters have against him this season. Lefties have just three hits off his cutter this year—all singles—and are coming up empty on more than a third (36.7%) of their swings at the pitch. For a guy who had middling success at best against same-sided hitters up to now—a career .285 wOBA-against vs. LHBs—the cutter is a friggin’ godsend.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Santiago’s command has also improved immensely. His ability to paint the inside corner with his fastball against right-handed batters has been almost uncanny. If someone were to ask me to sum up Santiago’s season in one pitch, it’d be that one. He seems to have no fear of missing with that pitch over the heart of the plate, attacking hitters with almost reckless abandon. Except, up to now it hasn’t been reckless at all. Per Brooks Baseball, Santiago’s overall percentage of “Grooved Pitches” is at an all-time low, and has improved for every individual pitch but his change-up, which has stayed more or less the same. Taking what we’ve learned in the previous paragraphs, this means that Santiago is living on the corners more than ever (because his Zone% is static) and doing so with aplomb.
Of course, there are still concerns. One of the biggest about the “real”-ness of Santiago’s 2015 is the sustained discrepancy between his ERA (2.33) and his FIP (3.91). Allow me to try putting your mind at ease about that.
There is no nuance whatsoever to FIP when it comes to balls in play. The whole design of the thing is to cut that factor out completely. I see this as a bug, not a feature. Assuming that all pitchers have zero control over their BABIP would be fine if they all had a similar batted-ball distribution, but they don’t.
Guys like Santiago, who sustain low GB% (30.7%), are going to generally have a lower BABIP than average because fly balls and pop-ups in play are outs far more often than grounders. This is undisputed. That FIP assumes everyone’s “true talent” is the same ~.290 BABIP despite this knowledge unfairly penalizes those with a flyball-heavy approach, and is why most “outperform” their FIP by a fair margin every year. They’re not outperforming anything in reality, the statistic simply doesn’t work for them. Like the simple Pythagorean Wins formula, FIP is fine for most but falls apart at the extremes.
All of which is a long way of saying that Santiago’s 3.91 FIP isn’t something to worry about. Will he regress some? Yes. His nearly 90% LOB% is going to drop, and his .247 BABIP *might* go up a bit. But that doesn’t necessarily mean his ERA will end up anywhere close to where his FIP is now because Santiago isn’t average, in any sense of the word.
He’s a damn All-Star. Chug the Kool-Aid.
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1 Second best in the AL among qualified pitchers, behind only Dallas Keuchel
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