The Real Santana Is Beginning To Emerge for Mets

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

It was always going to be hard for Johan Santana to live up to his billing this year. As the finest pitcher of his generation and the best-paid pitcher ever, he could only have met expectations by opening the season with several perfect games. He didn’t. By the second week of April he was jeered at Shea Stadium, and despite winding up the first half of the season among the league leaders in earned run average, innings pitched, and strikeouts, he was widely regarded as a mild disappointment.

As Santana failed to pitch like Sandy Koufax in his prime in the early going, two main theories developed. Adherents of the first held that he was damaged goods, noting that he’d lost a good two miles an hour off his fastball since 2006 and had, perhaps consequently, started giving up a lot more home runs. Advocates of the second pointed out that he has always been a second-half pitcher and counseled patience. They’re looking pretty good right now: Through the first 81 games of the year, Santana’s ERA was 3.01, and since then, it’s 2.27. The man is on his way to the best season any Mets pitcher has enjoyed since Al Leiter’s 1998.

Yesterday afternoon, in suffocating the Pittsburgh Pirates, Santana pitched perhaps his best game as a Met, one that looked a bit like a three-hour rendition of his entire season. He started good, and then got better. The first 10 hitters went down in order, mainly on badly hit grounders and fly balls; later in the game, five of seven struck out as Santana’s changeup dipped and danced around the plate as if the man had it on a line. Lousy relief pitching having cost him three leads in his last five games, Santana just finished the game himself, ending up with a complete game three-hit shutout.

This was as effortless a win as one can imagine for a team batting Damion Easley third in the lineup. Even granting that Pittsburgh’s gutted lineup is one of the least intimidating in the league right now, the sight of Santana effortlessly butchering them was still a bit scary. As good as he’s been up until now — and with a bit more run support and relief help, he’d be a leading contender for the Cy Young award — we’re only now starting to see the emergence of the pitcher who spent years tearing up the American League Central, probably the toughest division in the game during that time. It’s been worth the wait.

With their ace gearing up into full-bore dominance and having won six straight, the Mets are set to roll. After today’s game at Pittsburgh, it’s back to Shea for three against Atlanta and four against Houston. The Astros have been hot lately, but this still adds up to eight straight games in which fundamentally lame teams will be taking on a suddenly ferocious crew of starters that’s run up a 1.51 ERA over the last seven games. Pedro Martinez seems finally to have knocked the rust off his right arm, posting a 2.41 ERA in his last six starts. Between that and Mike Pelfrey’s emergence as a credible no. 3-type starter, the Mets now sport a rotation at least as deep as any in the league.

That rotation, one without any soft touches, has made an injury to closer Billy Wagner, and often horrific performances by his replacements, nearly irrelevant. It will probably remain so for another week, whatever Wagner’s disposition and whatever horrors right-handed short man Luis Ayala, acquired from Washington yesterday in exchange for no-hit infielder Anderson Hernandez, inflicts on the faithful. (Ayala, 30, has been very good for most of his career but stands a better chance of being this year’s Guillermo Mota or Mel Rojas than of recovering his mojo right away.) Relievers are important, but so are other things, like quality of competition and having an offense ranked second in runs per game.

If the starters keep hammering the opposition — and there’s little reason to think they won’t — the Mets could build up a serious lead in the next week. The team will need it, as after Houston they get 11 straight against Philadelphia, Florida, and Milwaukee, but thrashing the league’s weak sisters while breaking even against the real teams is a perfectly respectable way to win a division title. Unbelievably, given everything that’s happened this year, it seems almost likely that this is exactly what they’ll do.

***

The real sports story of the weekend, of course, far more important than anything the Mets or any swimmer did, was Chris Russo’s departure from WFAN’s Mike and the Mad Dog show after 19 years of whatever it is you would call what Russo did. Count me among the millions who hope and pray that this is some sort of horribly misguided negotiating ploy. Not since Lora Logic left X-Ray Spex has the world seen such a tragic and unnecessary divorce.

tmarchman@nysun.com


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