Danny Santana: Man, Myth or Mirage

Santana ranked 26th on Zach Sanders’ rankings, behind Drew Stubbs and ahead of Lorenzo Cain.

The Twins have been painfully short on innovation the last four years — not incidentally all 90-loss seasons — but one of the most creative things the club has done was moving infielder Danny Santana from the infield to center field.

The beginning to Aaron Hicks’ career has not been pretty, and with the Twins’ pre-Fuld outfield loaded with trudgers like Josh Willingham, Chris Parmelee and Oswaldo Arcia, it was clear the club needed another option in center. In fact, even with Sam Fuld around both he and Hicks suffered concussions right around the same time — necessitating another option out there.

Santana came up in early May and stayed up for good. He played shortstop for about the first week and then was pretty much a full-time center fielder with the exception of a couple spurts at short — one a little ways down the road and then to end the season.

And that might be where Santana, whose minor league track record clearly doesn’t match what he did this year, will end up. The early indications from new Twins manager Paul Molitor is that Santana will likely be the club’s regular shortstop, which not only creates a second hold in a ghastly Twins outfield — left field being the other — but displaces the erstwhile Eduardo Escobar, who in fact had a rather nice season at that spot (.275/.315/.406).

It is, however, probably smart to do so, and mitigate any potential decline from Escobar by making him a roving utility man — something he’s certainly cut out for. Escobar has played five different positions in his short major league career, and coming into last year was a 25-year-old who had hit all of .228/.280/.307 in 332 big league plate appearances. Moving him around maximizes his versatility, and can help ward off any possible regression.

But any regression discussion that is in the midst of Santana should clearly include Santana, for he of the .273/.317/.391 minor league batting line somehow manifested a .319/.353/.472 in a Target Field atmosphere which has been brutal to left-handed hitters for basically its entire five-year lifespan. The 2014 season was a bit better (103-100-91 park factors for 1B-2B/3B-HR via StatCorner), but it’s still totally bonkers for a 5-foot-11, 175 lb. left-handed hitter to post a batting line that would seem more fit for say, Arcia.

Obviously minor league hitting lines tells us very little, but what the heck was at play here? How is Santana, whose minor league track record seems to destin him to be more of a Cristian Guzman or a Luis Rivas type hitting line this? As simple as it may be, it’s tied nearly solely to BABIP.

Santana’s BABIP was .405. FOUR. OH. FIVE.

That simply isn’t sustainable. And despite my finest efforts to warn the townspeople, the expectations are pretty clear that Twins fans expect Santana to be the next best thing.

To the stat mobile! Santana was born at the end of the 1990 season. So just for fun, let’s have a look at hitters during his lifetime. Santana fell 73 plate appearances shy of qualifying for these leaderboards, so we’ll look at both the ‘qualified’ first and the ‘seasons over 400 plate appearances’ second.

Among qualified players, here’s the list of those who had a BABIP over .400 for a season:

2002 Jose Hernandez – .288/.356/.478 (.360 wOBA)
2000 Manny Ramirez – .351/.457/.697 (.477 wOBA)

The goggles do nothing when looking at Ramirez’ stat line that year; that’s just flat-out jacked up. But there you have it, two players — and one is FREAKING JOSE HERNANDEZ — have managed a .400 BABIP, and neither sustained it. This is out of a total of 3,586 players. Ramirez had a couple more .370s in him, and one earlier in his career as well. Hernandez’s next best was .350, and beyond that a .336 and a .319. So no, what Santana did isn’t particularly projectable.

But what about if we lower the threshold?

At 400 plate appearances, this is what our sample looks like (besides aforementioned Hernandez and Ramirez):

1996 Reggie Jefferson – .347/.388/.593 (.414 wOBA)
2014 Danny Santana – No. 2 on the list!
2012 Joey Votto – .337/.474/.567 (.438 wOBA)
2014 Drew Stubbs – .289/.339/.482 (.358 wOBA)
1996 Mariano Duncan – .340/.352/.500 (.366 wOBA)

A few things at play here. If you don’t recognize Jefferson and Duncan, that’s completely understandable. And Duncan’s isolated OBP! Yeesh. Duncan’s season was punctuated by a .347 before it and a .304 after it — so yeah, that’s pretty disparate. Jefferson, whom I vividly recall playing as on Sega’s World Series Baseball as an eight-year-old with the Seattle Mariners — YEAH Brian Turang and Marc Newfield! — was known for high BABIPs (hello .350 career mark) but he never again was close to .400. Stubbs in Coors is an a fascinating test subject that I’ve admittedly not dug into much, and Votto is a stud. Or was a stud. You get the picture.

Out of 4,873 batters to play in Santana’s lifetime, he is one of just seven to have a BABIP over .400. There are no repeat offenders. Only 16 players have even come within 10 points; only Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu have done that more than once.

None of this is to say Santana can’t be a good player, or that 2014’s batted balls have anything to do with this year’s. But will he sustain his $13 value even with a move to shortstop? According to Sanders’ rankings from this year, that’d make Santana a top-10 shortstop, behind Starlin Castro but ahead of Asdrubal Cabrera.

I’m just not buying it.