Help arrived, none too soon, in the person of Ervin Santana. And here we don’t mean pitching help, although it must be said that Santana worked one of the more impressive debuts in Braves annals. But pitching, at least through the season’s first nine days, hadn’t been the issue.
The Braves entered Wednesday’s game having seen their accidental rotation compile the lowest ERA (1.61) in the majors. Their hitters, sad to say, occupied the tail end of the statistical spectrum: The Braves’ batting average (.220) was the worst in baseball.
Thus do we fast-forward past the stuff Santana, imported in haste after the Braves lost Kris Medlen and Brandon Beachy to bum elbows in the span of 24 spring-training hours, is being paid $14.1 million to do. We skip over the first three innings, which saw him throw 28 strikes against one ball, to the bottom of the fifth, where the owner of four big-league hits stepped to the plate.
Never having worked for a National League team, Santana had made only 25 plate appearances in nine seasons. He had managed four hits, one of them a double. In his first at-bat as a Brave, he struck out looking. In his second, he galvanized a rally, a sight seldom seen this young season.
Evan Gattis, batting .177 with three hits on the season, pulled a leadoff double past David Wright. This brought up Jordan Schafer, in for B.J. Upton this night, and the replacement did his best B.J. impression by striking out. About here, you figured nothing much would come of this inning, as has been the case with most Braves innings. Then Santana served a Zack Wheeler delivery into right field, and an honest-to-goodness uprising was at hand.
Jason Heyward, who had three hits through seven games, mustered his third hit of the night — the first was a leadoff homer that capped a sterling 11-pitch at-bat — to make the score 2-0. Then Andrelton Simmons singled to load the bases. Then Freddie Freeman, who had been hitting the ball hard to little effect, hit the ball hard to great effect. His two-run single to left scored Santana and Heyward to make the score 4-0, and that was effectively that.
In his first bow as a Brave, Santana the pitcher was as masterful as Greg Maddux on a good day, which most Maddux days were. But Mad Dog, it must be said, hit 94 mph on the radar gun only in his dreams. Santana was the essence of both power and precision Wednesday. He didn’t throw a non-strike until his 21st pitch. He needed seven pitches to retire the Mets in the first inning, 15 in the second and seven more in the third. (By way of contrast, Wheeler’s first 15 pitches netted no outs, Simmons having singled after Heyward’s home run.)
Twenty-nine pitches, 28 of them strikes, called to mind the great Vin Scully’s apt description of the great Bob Gibson: “He pitches like he’s double-parked.” But Santana could well have had a hidden agenda. He might just have been in a hurry to take his cuts at Wheeler.
Santana’s line: Eight innings, three hits, no runs, no walks, six strikeouts, 88 pitches, 63 strikes. We around here have seen more than our share of stellar pitching performances, and this belonged on that same lofty shelf. It’s not uncommon for very good pitchers to become even better when they switch from the American League to the one without the DH — check Roy Halladay’s numbers — and if Santana can be anywhere near this good on a regular basis, the Braves might well have found the No. 1 starter they’ve lacked.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This was just one game, and these were only the Mets. And by now we should know that any starter the Braves trot out, from Ben Sheets in 2012 to Freddy Garcia in the 2013 NLDS to Aaron Harang this spring, is apt to throw a big game. Something about wearing this uniform — and surely having Roger McDowell as a pitching coach — tends to have a transforming effect on arms. (At least until those arms require examination by Dr. James Andrews. And no, that’s not a knock on McDowell or the Braves. Arms are tricky things.)
If it was just one game, it was nonetheless an eye-popper. A rotation decimated in March has gotten another boost, and Mike Minor and Gavin Floyd are on their way. At the rate this is going, the team that was strapped for starting pitching will again be swimming in the stuff. As for hitting …
Is there any chance Ervin Santana can play center field on those other four days?
