Twins

2016 Minnesota Twins Report Card: Hector Santiago

This is a series of evaluations that will be done this offseason on every player that closed the season on the 40-man roster for the Minnesota Twins, with one appearing every weekday from now until each player has been evaluated. The plan is to start with Mr. Albers and move all the way through the pitchers, then to the catchers, infielders, outfielders and finally those listed as designated hitters on the club’s official MLB.com roster. That means we’ll wrap it up with Miguel Sano sometime before the season starts.

  • Name: Hector Santiago
  • 2016 Role: Wound up being surprise trade deadline acquisition for the Twins, and made 11 so-so starts with a definite line in the sand separating good from bad.
  • Expected 2017 Role: Looks like he’ll be the No. 4 or 5 starter.
  • MLB Stats: 4.70 ERA (5.58 with Twins) in 182 innings, 7.1 K/9, 1.36 WHIP, 5.31 FIP, 0.4 fWAR.
  • MiLB Stats: N/A
  • Contract Status: Eligible for free agency following the 2017 season.

2016 Lowdown:

To say Santiago didn’t expect to be traded — to the Twins or anywhere — at the deadline is a vast understatement. Santiago told Cold Omaha in early September that he was given assurances by Angels club officials that he’d be staying put, and as a result was spending his off day doing some fishing and deep sea diving when he resurfaced to find a ton of messages on his phone, alerting him that he’d been traded from the Angels to the Twins for Ricky Nolasco and Alex Meyer.  

And while Santiago wasn’t having his best year to date in an Angels uniform (4.25 ERA, 5.04 FIP), the trade closed the door on a respectable three-year stretch for the 28-year-old left-hander. Santiago posted a 3.82 ERA with the Angels, with 2016 representing the first season since he’d been an MLB regular in which his ERA did not start with a 3. And while he took a step back with the Angels in 2016 — and perhaps a further step back with the Twins — is there reason to believe he could get things back on track in his walk year?

More on that in a bit.

In a way, Santiago is sort of the antithesis of the one of the guys he was traded for. That’s Nolasco, who consistently in his career has posted solid strikeout rates and done most of the things that traditionally feed into a healthy FIP, and typically ERA over long enough time frames. That simply hasn’t happened for Nolasco, who has struck out 7.2 batters per nine in his career while walking just 2.1. He’s posted a respectable home run rate (1.1 per nine) and as a result has a career FIP of 3.85 — and yet, an ERA of 4.52.

He is, what we’d call, a FIP underachiever.

Santiago is quite the opposite. His career ERA is 3.84 while his FIP is nearly a run higher at 4.73 through over 700 career innings. In fact, that gap was even more pronounced before 2016 (3.55 career ERA, 4.54 FIP). Santiago was a classic FIP overachiever heading into 2016, and after facing 2,300 batters in his career to that point, it felt like an “if the shoe fits, wear it” kind of scenario. Heck, even in a rough 2016 season, Santiago still beat his FIP (5.31) by more than a half-run (4.70) between the Angels and Twins.

So what does Santiago do that FIP hates? Well, sort of…..everything? He’s been what ball guys might call “effectively wild,” as he’s walked 4.0 batters per nine — nearly twice as many as Nolasco — in his MLB career. He’s not at all a groundball pitcher (33.4 percent) and as a result has a bit of a propensity to give up home runs. His saving grace is strikeouts, as he’s fanned 8.0 per nine over his MLB career, though that slipped to a career-low mark of 7.1.

And perhaps that’s where some of the trouble lies with a guy like Santiago. He throws plenty hard (91.3 mph career average FB, 91.4 in 2016) for a lefty and can mix it up with up to a half-dozen different pitches throughout the course of his big league career. In 2016, none of those pitches were obscenely effective from a whiffs standpoint — and that’s kind of true for most of his career. None of the six pitches Fangraphs charted for Santiago last season registered a double-digit whiff rate. On the flip side, none of them were below 7 percent, either.

Basically speaking, he was pretty consistent across the board.  

But on the negative side, only one of those pitches — his slider — induced an OPS under .700. He only threw that pitch 170 times out of more than 3,000 total offerings. Basically speaking, it appears as though the margin of error for someone like Santiago is relatively thin.

But intuitively speaking, that makes sense — right? A guy with decent stuff who doesn’t throw many strikes and gives up a lot of balls in the air is going to have a pretty thin margin no matter if he’s left-handed, right-handed or a JUGS machine. In that sense, being committed to Santiago just through this year makes sense for the Twins as they’re currently constructed.

That’s not to say there aren’t some positives to glean from an otherwise unsightly stretch with the Twins. Santiago was bombed in his first four starts with the Twins to the tune of an ERA near 11.00 and an OPS against of over 1.100. Santiago told Cold Omaha that he went to the Twins and basically said, “Look, this isn’t working.” He then reverted back to his old mechanics — it’s a little strange the Twins would try to change him with his age and success, no? — which paid immediate dividends as he shut down the ultimate American League Champion Cleveland Indians for 6.1 innings on just three hits. That same Indians club bopped him to the tune of four earned runs in five innings in his Twins debut at Progressive Field three days after he was traded.

The numbers to close the season for Santiago were far more like him, albeit certainly not perfect. In his final seven starts — from the mechanics reversion on — Santiago posted a 3.19 ERA in 42.1 innings with a .682 OPS against and a 25-19 K/BB ratio. That’s not great, but it’s along the same lines of effectively wild.

Might as well ride the horse that got you there, right?

Grade: C-. A tough start sullies the overall results, but there’s little reason to believe that Santiago can’t be — at best — a fairly good trade chip for the Twins at the 2017 trade deadline. Simply moving on from Nolasco gives the Twins the leg up moving forward.

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