Can Ervin Santana Do Better This Time Around?

A year ago, Ervin Santana was a free agent saddled with a qualifying offer. He was coming off a 2.9 WAR season, but he massively misread the market and his own worth, attempting to pitch teams on a deal that exceeded $100 million. Ultimately, he remained unsigned until March, when the Braves gave him the financial equivalent of the qualifying offer largely because injuries to Kris Medlen, Brandon Beachy and Mike Minor ruined Atlanta’s rotation depth.

As of this moment, Santana again is a free agent saddled with a qualifying offer. This time, he’s coming off a 2.8 WAR season. According to at least one report, he’s “seeking a five-year deal.” Assuming he’s not planning to take a pay cut in any of those years, that’s at least $75 million.

This all worked out terribly for Santana last year, when he said free agency “wasn’t what I expected, it was hard” and that he “[didn’t] know what the difference is” between himself and pitchers who landed massive deals. In part because of that, he parted ways with agent Bean Stringfellow. Santana’s outlook on free agency doesn’t appear to have changed at all. But has he? Is there any reason this will work out better this time around?

Santana may seem like the same pitcher he was a year ago, but there’s at least one thing working in his favor. Last year, he was coming off one good season and one of the worst seasons by a regular starter in the past 50 years. This year, he’s coming off of two consecutive good seasons. If the goal is to convince a team that his awful 2012 was an outlier, then that’s an easier sell this time.

Of course, WAR is just one way to look at things, and while our WAR says his past two years were identical, he got there in different ways. Due in part to that, there’s not even really public agreement on the kind of season he just had. For example, here’s one nationally known writer saying Santana is coming off a “big year“; here’s another saying his 2014 “wasn’t as good as his 2013.” Let’s dig into that.

During Santana’s career, his ERA and FIP are nearly identical to one another, indicating his run-prevention skills have generally reflected his three-true-outcomes talent. But he’s hardly been consistent in that, especially over the past two seasons. In 2013, he out-pitched a 3.93 FIP with a 3.24 ERA. In 2014 — despite pitching in front of Jason Heyward and Andrelton Simmons — he under-performed a 3.39 FIP with a 3.95 ERA. When you put the past two years together, the ups and downs come out in the wash. But if you prefer RA9-WAR rather than our usual FIP-WAR — which is to say, you care more about what did happen than what should have happened — then you’re looking at a pitcher who dropped from 4.4 WAR to 1.8 WAR.

When Santana’s agents pitch him this winter, they’ll be trumpeting what seems like increased strikeout stuff, thanks to an 8.22 K/9 and 21.9 K% that both rank as his second-best marks, behind only his long-ago (and outstanding) 2008. For example, Jon Heyman recently declared that “scouts noticed his velocity and strikeouts were up.”

Let’s take the second part first. Santana’s strikeouts were up: 179 is more than 161 or 133 — his raw whiff totals from the previous two years. Also, 8.22 is higher than 6.87 or 6.72. And 21.9% is higher than 18.7% or 17.4%. You can’t argue with those numbers.

Now let’s refute all of that. For the first nine years of Santana’s career, he pitched in the American League. He spent 2005 to 2012 with the Angels and 2013 in Kansas City before making his National League debut in 2014. With the advent of daily interleague play, there’s not nearly as much difference between the two leagues as there used to be, but a National League pitcher is still going to face more opposing pitchers at the plate. In 2013, Santana faced just one pitcher. He gave up a single to Zack Wheeler. In 2014, he piled up an additional 23 strikeouts against 60 pitcher plate appearances, clearly easier opposition than he would have faced in previous years.

You probably know where this is going, but I’ll share my work with you anyway in more detail than you need. If you separate out Santana’s performance in the past two years against pitchers and non-pitchers, which Baseball Reference helpfully allows you to do…

E.Santana, strikeout performance, 2013 and 2014
	2013	2014		2013	2014		2013	2014
	PA			K			BB
vs All	859	817		161	179		51	63
vs P	1	60		0	23		0	3
vs Non-P	858	757		161	156		51	60
	2013	2014		2013	2014		2013	2014
	K%			BB%			K%-BB%
vs All	18.7%	21.9%		5.9%	7.7%		12.8%	14.2%
vs P	0.0%	38.3%		0.0%	5.0%		0.0%	33.3%
vs Non-P	18.8%	20.6%		5.9%	7.9%		12.8%	12.7%

… you’ll see that Santana’s strikeout rate against non-pitchers was only slightly better. Did you know that across the entire game, pitchers hitting struck out 36.6% of the time? That’s almost identical to Santana’s 38.3% strikeout rate against pitchers batting, meaning he got a pretty standard boost by switching leagues. When you include an increase in walks, the outcome of all of this — highlighted in red, because it’s important — is a pitcher who just put up two all-but-identical seasons in two of the most important things a pitcher can do, which is a really long way of repeating that FIP-WAR thinks he wasn’t much different from 2013 or 2014. Yes, Santana’s strikeouts increased, but also, yes, the opposition made it easier.

The scout above also said that Santana’s velocity increased, but if you trust Brooks — as you should — that’s a tough sell. Here’s Santana’s average fastball velocity in the past four seasons:

2011: 93.49 mph
2012: 92.38 mph
2013: 93.40 mph
2014: 93.52 mph

Santana had a slight dip in 2012, but otherwise has thrown just as hard as he always has. Even if that comment was intended to be within the context of 2014, the numbers don’t really back that up, either. Every month showed a fastball velocity in line with his usual.

If this is starting to sound down on Santana, it’s not intended to be. A durable, above-average pitcher — as he has been for most of the past several years, other than 2012 — is a valuable item. It’s especially worth noting in Santana’s case, because he’s an extreme outlier when it comes to pitchers who have rehabbed through a partially torn UCL, which is generally a path that elicits laughter because it never, ever works — except when it does, and it seems to have for Santana. He’s shown an ability to evolve, mixing in more changeups and throwing more sliders than any other pitcher in 2013-2014, which is either a good thing (sliders are hard to hit!) or a bad thing (they’re death on elbows!) depending on your perspective.

Perhaps mindful of that 2012, Steamer doesn’t entirely love Santana in 2015. It projects another useful average-ish season somewhat similar to his last two as he heads into his age-32 season, and putting him near the top of the second tier of free-agent starters. Because of his home run issues, his run-prevention numbers will be hugely based on what park he actually ends up pitching in, but since he’s a year older and shouldn’t be viewed all that differently than he was a year ago, is that going to be enough to break him out of the qualifying-offer prison that hurt him so badly last year?

In a word: No. Santana is valuable, but expecting him to be useful in 2015 is not the same thing as making plans for him in 2019, as his idea of five years would indicate. In fact, let’s use some quick-and-dirty stats to compare Santana to a similar pitcher from each of the past two winters — guys in the same age bracket who had similar performance and reputations, Edwin Jackson and Ricky Nolasco — and use their previous two years of performance to get around Santana’s brutal 2012:

	Age	Two-Yr FIP	Two-Yr ERA	Two-Yr WAR	Q. Offer?	Contract
Santana	32	3.67	3.58	5.7	Yes	??
Jackson	29	3.69	3.91	5.8	No	4/$52 million
Nolasco	31	3.60	4.08	5.6	No	4/$49 million + option

Both of them got four years in the $50 million range. Neither one had to deal with the qualifying offer drag, and both were younger. (Santana and Nolasco are actually just one day apart from each other, but we’re talking about last winter for Nolasco.) And, of course, both of those contracts have looked awful so far.

When you, dear readers, crowdsourced a Santana estimate, you settled on roughly three years and $40 million. That doesn’t sound unreasonable because it’s along the lines of what similar pitchers got in recent years, adjusted down for age and the draft-pick tax. Perhaps the biggest thing Santana and his agents could do differently is to adjust their expectations, or at the least not pretend Santana isn’t much different from Zack Greinke.

He’s not likely to get the huge contract that eluded him last winter, however. But hey, if he can’t find something he finds suitable? Certainly, some team in need of a boost would be thrilled to land him for one year and the equivalent of the qualifying offer, just like Atlanta did in March.