Santos an instant hit, once he stopped hitting
Transition from shortstop to pitcher amazingly smooth for Jays’ new closer
The bases are loaded with two out, full count.
It’s the top of the eighth inning and the Chicago White Sox — up 2-0 on the Detroit Tigers — are trying to hold off a late-game rally by their division rivals.
Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera, one of the most feared hitters in baseball, is at the plate. It’s less than halfway into the season, and he already has 18 home runs.
On the mound for the White Sox is Sergio Santos, the club’s rookie reliever, with less than 20 majorleague innings under his belt.
“I can remember every pitch of that at-bat,” Santos says on this day, almost two years later.
The Chicago crowd rises to their feet.
Santos, who normally lights up radar guns with a fastball in the midto-high 90s, grips a change-up in his glove. He winds up and delivers. Cabrera whiffs. The White Sox hold the lead and go on to win the game.
It was then, on June 10, 2010, that Santos realized he was a pitcher and not just a “thrower.”
“If I was just a thrower I would throw a 3-2 fastball,” he says. “In that high pressure situation to go with a ‘feel’ pitch — a pitch where you have to feel it coming off — to be able to do that 3-2, bases loaded, in the eighth, up by two . . . it was a big pitch.”
The converted shortstop had been on the mound for more than a year by that point, but he didn’t feel like a big-league pitcher until he could battle against the best hitters with the game on the line and win.
“That’s when it really hit me that I could have a lot of success at this.”
As the Blue Jays closer this year, Santos will be called upon to anchor the team’s revamped bullpen and provide stability to a role that was erratic and ineffective last season.
He is the centrepiece of Alex Anthopoulos’s off-season overhaul of the Jays’ bullpen, which was among the worst in the league last year, earning a dubious 25 blown saves.
For the Jays to take a step forward this season, Santos will have to consistently shut the door and deny opponents any second chances.
Funny that, since Santos’ majorleague career was built on a second chance.
Sergio Santos was an all-star shortstop.
In his hometown of Santa Ana, Calif., they called him “the next ARod.”
The 18-year-old wowed scouts with his rocket of an arm, and he became a first-round draft pick of the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2002.
Santos rose steadily through the minor leagues, continuing his stellar play until he reached triple-a. His defence remained strong, but he couldn’t hit with any kind of consistency. For the first time in his life, he struggled and couldn’t find a way out.
The Diamondbacks traded him, with Troy Glaus, to the Blue Jays in 2005 for Miguel Batista and Orlando Hudson. But Santos continued to slump at the plate.
He was waived by the Jays in 2008, claimed by the Minnesota Twins, released again, and then signed as a free agent with the White Sox in 2009.
The White Sox were impressed by Santos’ strength and baseball intelligence, but because of his lack of hitting ability, did not have a place for him on either the big-league team or the triple-a affiliate.
They wanted him to try pitching, but Santos was reluctant.
“I didn’t want to put down the bat,” he said.
Buddy Bell, director of player development for the White Sox, was so enamoured with Santos he agreed to make a deal with the player: they would try to trade him to a team that was interested in him as a shortstop, but only on the condition that the team would trade him back if he was not going to be an everyday player. So if Santos ended up back with the White Sox, he would have to give pitching a try. Santos agreed, saying later that it gave him “peace of mind” to know he would have done everything he could to make it as a position player. He was with the San Francisco Giants for 10 days before they sent him back to Chicago. With Bell at the helm, the White Sox set out to remake Santos as a pitcher in 2009. They started him in the lowest possible level — extended spring training — and the plan was to graduate him slowly through the minor leagues, no matter how impatient Santos became. “His greatest asset was his arm,” Bell said. “His greatest enemy was his patience.” Santos said he had a feel for throwing strikes right away. The first slider he ever gripped showed majorleague movement. He wanted to start pitching in the big leagues as soon as possible. Bell asked Santos to trust him and the team’s coaching staff. At every level, pitching coaches had Santos concentrate on commanding his fastball — not just throwing the pitch for strikes, but locating it in particular parts of the strike zone at will, on command. “He would pitch in the middle of the plate, which you can’t do,” Bell said. “He had to get a feel for pitching in and out, when to throw a change-up. But he just kept figuring it out, without much help from us.” During the 2009 season, Santos spent about a month at every mi- nor-league level, from extended spring training to the Arizona Fall League. He excelled at every stage. One of the major keys to his success was how quickly he developed off-speed pitches. “The more I was pitching, the more I was getting on the mound, the more I was throwing, I felt more and more comfortable,” Santos says. By the time he reached the Arizona Fall League, the White Sox’s secret was out. “He was the talk of the league,” said Bell. “Most converted guys look like converted guys; he looked like a pitcher.” Santos made his major-league debut in the White Sox bullpen the next season.
“It’s one of the latest-breaking sliders I’ve ever caught.” J.P. ARENCIBIA JAYS CATCHER ON CLOSER SERGIO SANTOS’ MAIN STRIKEOUT PITCH
Santos isn’t the first major-leaguer to transition to the mound at the highest level — all-star relievers Trevor Hoffman and Rafael Soriano are two of the most successful conversions in recent years — but the ease and speed at which Santos was able to transition to such a physically demanding and technically difficult position is remarkable. By all accounts, he was a natural. “It really wasn’t that difficult,” Bell says of the transition. “I think we’d all like to take credit for it, but we didn’t really do a whole lot.” Most pitchers, including those who have been pitching their whole careers, need time to figure out how to pitch in the majors, Bell said. But Sergio “already had a feel for it.” “To me, pitching was more based off feel,” Santos says, adding nobody really showed him how to do it.
“If I threw a good slider, I was like, ‘What did I feel when I threw that slider?’ And it was just a matter of, ‘How can I get more consistent with this?’”
Santos is a power pitcher and relies heavily on his fastball. But his most impressive pitch is his slider, which ESPN stats analysts called the best strikeout pitch in baseball last year after studying data from across the league.
When thrown with two strikes, Santos’ slider struck out opposing batters almost half the time. A respectable put-away rate is around 30 per cent.
“It’s one of the latest-breaking sliders I’ve ever caught,” said Jays catcher J.P. Arencibia. “It gets to the plate and then takes a hard turn.”
More than anything, Bell says, Santos was easy to root for.
“He has such a great combination of brains and heart you don’t see a whole lot . . . and that’s what a real big-leaguer is.”
The Blue Jays have the 28-yearold signed through 2014, plus three option years.
So he could potentially be with the club until 2018. He may be 28, but his arm is young.
Last season, he struck out 35.4 per cent of the batters he faced, thirdhighest among relievers with at least 50 innings. The Jays’ brass thought enough of him to send high-ranking pitching prospect Nestor Molina the other way.
But should Jays fans be concerned about him sneaking in a little batting practice? Demanding a trade to the National League to get some at-bats? He says he’s done switching positions and now uses his hitter’s mentality to his advantage.
“I know how hard it is to hit, I couldn’t do it,” he said. “So as a pitcher I take that with me, because I think sometimes pitchers give hitters a little too much credit.” Does Santos miss the bat?
“Absolutely . . . I tried everything I could to continue position playing and it just wasn’t in the cards. Now I’ve got to play the hand I’m dealt and I just feel lucky and fortunate I was given a second chance and I’m making the most of it.”