Danny Santana’s Reappearing Act

In baseball, sooner or later, everyone disappears. From those who secured rare 10-and-5 rights, to those who played long enough to experience free agency, and for those whose big league appearances can be counted on one hand, everyone disappears eventually. 

It might feel slightly morbid to think of it that way, but really the difficulty of remaining in affiliated, let alone Major League, baseball is what makes baseball players so special. The average Major League career is between 5 and 6 years. A player who registered just a couple MLB plate appearances or innings pitched has already outperformed an insanely crowded field. With a finite amount of roster space, those players who retire, willingly or otherwise, give way to a new player, hoping to make his mark.

Danny Santana, for all intents and purposes, looked close to disappearing. In parts of five years in the Majors from 2014-2018, his seasonal plate appearances total shrank each season, peaking at 430 in his debut season and bottoming out last year when he made it to the plate just 32 times at the game’s highest level.

Without attempting to untangle the direction of causality, Santana’s playing performance directly corresponded to his diminishing playing time. Following a proficient 3.9 fWAR season as a rookie in his age-23 season, Santana was the Twins’ Opening Day shortstop for the 2015 season. But things quickly unraveled as he was unable to replicate his dynamic performance from the year prior. 

He struggled mightily both in 2015 and 2016, the latter season of which he was plagued by multiple injuries. The Twins gave in and designated Santana for assignment in early March of 2017 and shortly thereafter worked out a trade to send Santana to the Braves for Kevin Chapman. Two more trips to the injured list in 2017 ruined Santana’s first shot with the Braves. 

All in all, he would fail to meet replacement-level play any of the four seasons following his rookie year. If you’re not named Jeff Mathis, sporting a sub-.606 OPS for parts of four consecutive seasons is fairly damning to your career. 

Still, given his youth, switch hitting ability and defensive versatility, Santana earned a minor league deal with an invitation to Spring Training with the Rangers this January. Minor league signings usually fly under the radar, and generally for good reason. They very rarely translate to strong production when all is said and done. That the Rangers have now secured more than 3.0 fWAR across the trio of Logan Forsythe, Hunter Pence, and Santana is remarkable in and of itself.

Unlike Forsythe and Pence though, Santana had not yet reached free agency. Or had a career known for much more than unfulfilled expectations of Twins fans following his debut. And that is what makes this so special: how close Santana might have been to disappearing.

In a landscape where players disappear all the time, what might have happened if Santana hadn’t signed his minor league deal with the needy Rangers? What happens if he didn’t manage to hit a respectable .280 during the minuscule sample size (53 PA’s) that is Spring Training? What happens if he didn’t impress Chris Woodward? What happens if he starts the season by going, say, 6 for 32 in 9 games for AAA Nashville, opposed to 12 for 32?

There is no counterfactual. We won’t ever know the answer to these hypothetical questions. But splitting hairs is what makes Santana’s resurgence so remarkable in retrospect.  

Another reason for this remarkable performance is how much Santana has defied, at least to this point, advanced metrics. To start, his BABIP is .394, a number well north of what is considered sustainable; should some of his hits stop falling in, his .313 batting average will correspondingly regress.

To compound the issue of an inflated BABIP is poor on-base skills to neutralize any eventual drop off. For a player who walks 10% of the time, batting average is a slightly lesser part of his game. Santana, on the other hand, has walked in just 4.1% of his plate appearances. Thus, his walk rate will do very little to offset any batting average dip. 

To his credit, Santana seems to have adapted his game some. Already he has doubled his career home run total from 13 to 26 this season, and has a career high .241 ISO to show for it. That ISO matches with a hard hit rate of 44.9% and 30+ extra base hits in under 300 plate appearances. 

But the cost of Santana’s newfound power is some recklessness. He has struck out in 27.7% of his plate appearances, a high percentage even before juxtaposing it to his lilliputian walk rate. 

Santana swings at more than 8% more pitches (55.4%) than league average (47.0%) and his swinging strike rate is >3.5% above league average to compound that effect. 

So, the numbers suggest that Danny Santana’s resurgence might not be something to make a lasting bet on. ZiPS projects Santana to be worth a pedestrian 1.2 WAR over the next three years combined, likely taking into account some of these stats and then a lot more.

But in the here and now, the fact is that he has performed, and performed at a very high level. He has played with these lopsided stats all year since his call up on April 13th, and has only gotten better of late. His OPS was .897 in April, .720 in May, .928 in June, and 1.060 to date in July. His .909 OPS this season is tied with two All-Stars, DJ LeMahieu and Matt Chapman, for 26th in MLB. And for all that, Danny Santana is well worth appreciating.