Ervin Santana is MLB's luckiest pitcher, not Cy Young candidate
Minnesota Twins starter Ervin Santana has benefited from an absurd run of luck so far in 2017, and on the strength of things we cannot begin to describe, there are some certainly willing to consider the 34-year old as a darkhorse for a Cy Young Award. He probably shouldn't be.
Sadly, there's no getting around it: Luck is everywhere in baseball. Despite being one of the most quantized professional sports, there are times when observers and critics must throw up their hands at a baffling outcome—or series of them—and say simply, "random chance did it."
Likewise, there's no describing Ervin Santana's 8-3 record on the year, tied for second in the league in pitching wins. There's no concrete equation that outputs his 2.20 ERA so far through 90 innings, a full 95 percent better than league average when adjusting for run environment and park effects. Nor is there a satisfactory explanation of his 0.889 WHIP, third in all of baseball among starters behind Dallas Keuchel and Max Scherzer.
Simply put, Ervin Santana, or at least his 2017 incarnation, should not be happening. He's not this good. He's 34 years old. Only twice in his career has he posted a season-long FIP below 3.50, and those two seasons were separated by five more of mere adequacy on the bump.
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No, something else must be at play, here, something that when combined with his increased use of a two-seam fastball and changeup, explains his ERA and WHIP while also accounting for his pedestrian 4.44 FIP on the year. Random chance does just that.
Santana is, far and away, the largest beneficiary of peripheral "luck" metrics, and the impact they can have on more commonplace statistics shown during a broadcast. Among qualified starters, Ervin Santana leads baseball in BABIP at .154 by almost 50 whole percentage points. His HR/FB rate is 18th in the league among all 85 qualifying pitchers at 10.9 percent. The rate at which he leaves runners on base—only high strikeout pitchers have shown an ability to control this rate—is a stunning 88.6 percent, third in the league behind Clayton Kershaw and Dallas Keuchel.
Of course, none of the luck metrics take away from what has been accomplished. Santana actually did pitch well enough to "win" 8 games so far, and teams have scored nearly half the runs against him than they do against the league average. What takes away from Santana's Cy Young candidacy is that he is almost certainly due to regress to the mean, hard. Remember, the further one deviates from the mean in luck-based metrics, the more likely they are to perform at or close to the average in the next observational period.
Look for Ervin Santana to regress himself out of Cy Young contention, or be one of the luckiest pitchers in history to win the award. Either way, random chance did it.
