By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/10/03/al-wild-card-game-santana-faces-singing-winds-yankee-beasts/Twelve years ago, the Yankees got a division series Game Five shock from an Angels rookie named Ervin
Santana. It cost them a trip to the American League Championship Series, where the Angels would be
broken on one of the worst blown calls in postseason history, but that’s another story.
With starter Bartolo Colon exiting early thanks to a loudly barking shoulder, Santana opened the top of
the second with two runs against him. That was all the Yankees would get. They tied it in the bottom
when Garret Anderson ripped Mike Mussina’s 3-1 service over the left field fence and, later, Adam
Kennedy tripled home Bengie Molina and Steve Finley.
The Angels hung up two more on Mussina’s dollar an inning later while Santana cruised for the most
part through the next four and a third, interrupted only when Derek Jeter opened the Yankee seventh
hitting an 0-1 pitch into the bleachers. Ill-fated Kelvim Escobar took over and brought the game to
then-closer Francisco Rodriguez, and the Angels banked the 5-3 win and ill-fated League Championship
Series date with the White Sox.
That was then, and that was also on the Angels’ home turf. Santana’s maddening inconsistency—he
looked like a virtuoso one season and an also-ran the next, so it seemed—became too much of enough
for the Angels to trade him to the Royals for Brandon Sisk, a pitcher who has yet to show up in even
one major league uniform.
Santana had one hard luck season in Kansas City, another one in Atlanta (his fielding-independent
pitching was well below his ERA), and has since made a solid career with the Twins, interrupted only
by his eighty-game suspension for his first Twins season for stanozolol, an actual or alleged performance-
enhancing substance he swore he took unknowingly in a medication obtained in his native Dominican
Republic.
Now Santana—whose birth name wasn’t Ervin, but who adopted it early in his career to avoid confusion
with a former Twins ace who shares his actual birth name, Johan Santana—is the man the Twins hope can
send the Yankees one-and-done home in the wild card game. The Yankees, of course, don’t share that
hope.
In fact, the Yankees already have their plans for Santana, according to NJ.com’s Brendan Kuty: take as
many pitches as they can get away with, lay away from Santana’s near-trademark sliders on the corners
of the zone, avoid his almost as effective changeup, and make him throw fastballs on which they can
make him pay big.
“When you think of him,” said Yankees third baseman Chase Headley, “the first pitch you think of is his
slider. That’s been his bread and butter for as long as I can remember. But the velocity is up. He throws
a good changeup as well. A veteran pitcher that knows what he’s doing, knows he’s going to have a
good plan, isn’t going to give in.”
“When you’re swinging out of the zone,” added Todd Frazier, “he’s going to get a lot more opportunities
to strike you out and get you out. Just stay within your zone. The old saying: How do you hit the slider?
You don’t miss the fastball. So hopefully that’s what happens.”
The old Jeter Yankees had trouble enough doing those things back in that 2005 division series Game Five.
These Yankees aren’t those Yankees, of course, And while they’re sending Luis Severino to the mound
against Santana, they have an advantage the Twins lack: they can afford to yank Severino at the earliest
signs of real trouble and go to their formidable if not quite Indians-stingy bullpen.
If the Yankees get to Santana early and often, they can have a party at the expense of a Twins bullpen
that had the league’s ninth-worst bullpen ERA (4.40) and struck out only 19.8 percent of the hitters they
faced.
Shades of the 1986 Mets versus the 1986 Red Sox in that surreal World Series. “I wouldn’t have said this
going into the Series,” said Mets second baseman Wally Backman when that Series was over, “but we
knew that if we could get into their bullpen it would be no contest.”
“When I was with Minnesota and played behind him,” said Santana’s former teammate Aaron Hicks, “he
threw a lot of pitches that were balls and a lot of people were swinging. At the same time, it seems like
he attacks the zone very well. He always seems to be getting first-pitch strikes. He’s just a very knowl-
edgeable pitcher.”
Santana, for his part, isn’t exactly enamoured with the idea of pitching in the new Yankee Stadium.
“The ballpark’s small. Balls carry here. You can see that any fly ball is going to be a home run or off the
wall,” he told the New York Post. “There’s nothing you can do about it. They’re not going to change it
anyway. Anything I say or not say, they’re not going to change it. So just have to deal with it.”
He’ll have to deal with a Yankee lineup that’s hard enough in their lefthanded hitting without throwing
righthanded assassins Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez in for good measure. And unless the Twins make
defensively-challenged Sanchez work by pressuring his arm and his concentration when they reach
base, it won’t be an easy day’s play for Santana or the Twins.
“If he’s pitching well and we’re looking at fifth, sixth inning and he’s still rolling,” said manager Paul
Molitor, “you’re going to probably give him an opportunity to keep going. Obviously, in a one-game
scenario, it might be a little quicker than normal [hook] knowing you have fresh arms . . .and he’s
210 innings into the season.”
Translation: The Twins will trust their starter but cut the cards. “Anyone who doesn’t believe in
miracles,” Santana himself tweeted, “is not a realist.” True enough, and you admire his confidence,
but they’re still cutting the cards.
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