Not everything has to be a series from me. Do I have to sell a gimmick to get you to latch on to what I’m reading? Sure, I brought you the Under The Greydar series and yeah, I brought you Deep League Thoughts. And yeah, I started a bit of a series called Draft Day Arbitrage which we’re still working on but sometimes a particular topic just grabs me and I gotta get it out there to the masses without precedences. You see, as I started looking into the draft season that is now upon us I started liking Carlos Santana more and more despite him losing catcher eligibility in most leagues outside of Yahoo. Obviously the public isn’t lukewarm on him as he’s still a top 75 player overall on most draft boards but in light of recent findings on him, I am beginning to wonder if, much like Alison Brie, he is underrated for his assets because they haven’t been fully exposed on the world. Well, lets loosen up that bra strap and ummm…yeah, there’s no analogy here. Roll the credits! Here’s Carlos and how his move to first actually has some goodness tied to it for 2015 Fantasy Baseball…
Before we journey on, I’d like to point out that deranged minds think alike. Our good buddy Dynasty Mike came to some similar conclusions in his Carlos Santana Keeper piece back in December. But of course, I got my own take and now my own mic so let me step up and drop this hot take on the masses. On the surface, Carlos Santana’s fairly perma-move to 1B doesn’t seem to get many excited. His ADP in standard ESPN drafts is about 82 right now and his consensus rank plunks him down right about in the same area as the player #81 off the board and overall 1B number 17 and 3B number 10 off the board. To be fair, if rankings are coming off of steamer projections, I can see the reason why. They’re only giving him a slashline of 76/22/76/.245/4. Given his underlying career numbers, though, those projections seem Crazy with a capital Gnarls Barkley. It’s fair to say it looks like during his big home run years of 2011 and 2014 he sacrificed average for power (.239 and .231, respectively), but I don’t think those numbers take into consideration his splits across the positions he’s played in his career. I also think his .231 batting average was weighted heavily by him trying to learn 3rd and never getting the hang of it. In fact, he only hit .129 in 26 games at 3B in 2014. Take away those 26 games and Santana hits a respectable .252 on the year but I decided to dig a bit further. With that, I looked strictly at his numbers at first base and saw something to get happy about. In 94 games, Carlos slugged 20 of his 27 HRs on the year at first while hitting .274. Of course, maybe it’s all just happy circumstance and means nothing. But then you look at his career splits at 1B and notice a trend. As a catcher over 1341 career PAs, Santana is a lackluster .241 hitter. As a DH in 425, he’s at .257. But at 1B, in 872 PAs, Santana has a .270 average. It also happens to be where Santana has enjoyed the highest BABIP, ISO, HR/FB%, and slugging for his career by a wide margin. So here comes the fun part. If we project Santana based off of his numbers as a first baseman for his career off of his 152 game, 660 PA season in 2014, we’d get something close to 29 HRs, 92 RBIs, 81 runs, and about 3 steals to go with a .260+ average or as I like to call it, a better steamer version of Albert Pujols (76/25/86/.268/4). Given that Santana is both still in his prime at 29 this year and won’t have to deal with the burden of playing catcher much over the course of the season, he should be able to stay relatively healthy and not wear down like many catchers do over the course of the year. In essence, Santana could finish on the fringe of top 5 1B this year without doing much more than he has at first for his career. Oh and for a 3B? Yeah, we’re talking potential top 3. So here’s to Carlos being Santastic at first in 2015.
