Thanks to the season-long constant flurry of minor league pitching additions, I wouldn’t blame anyone who doesn’t remember the Cubs signing big righty Antonio Santos earlier this year. The Cubs nabbed Santos out of the Mexican League, where he’d been dominating over four starts, and sent him to Double-A Tennessee, where he has interspersed absolutely outrageous outings with periodic implosions. It was never quite consistent enough to get on our radar.
We’ll see if that remains the case for the 27-year-old former Rockies prospect heading into 2025 (the Cubs will need to re-sign him if they want to keep him), but he REALLY showed out last night in the opening game of the Southern League divisional series.
The Tennessee Smokies primarily on the strength of a double-digit strikeou𝔉t performance from Santos:
Santos, who turns 28 next month, actually reached the big leagues with the Rockies in 2020 and 2021, having jumped straight from Double-A during the pandemic season. He pitched as a reliever at that point, did not have success, was waived, and picked up by the Mets. In 2022, again pitching exclusively in relief, Santos really struggled at Double-A and Triple-A in the Mets’ system. That left him without an affiliated opportunity in 2023, so he tried to catch on with an independent team in Japan, and then stayed fresh in the Dominican Winter League. From there, he signed in Mexico for this season. That’s where he went back to starting full-time, dominated, and the Cubs picked him up.
In♏cluding the playoff 🎃performance, Santos has an ERA and FIP well under 4 at Tennessee over 74.2 innings, a strikeout rate near 30%, a walk rate around 8%, and a HR/9 around 1. All good numbers.
So, w🃏hat do we now think about Santos going forward?
I think his unique trajectory can do a bit to mitigate any age-related concerns on Santos – i.e., he’s not exactly the same as a typical 27/28-year-old Double-A pitcher would be, who would pretty much be off the radar. Sometimes guys just take a little longer, particularly when they’ve had their development interrupted by moves between the bullpen and starting, rapid multi-level jumps, a pandemic, and so on and so forth. Maybe it just took all that to get him where he needed to be, and then something in Mexico simply clicked.
But I would raise one concern – well, a question at least – about the changeup. Sometimes, older and experienced pitchers who can change speeds really well will dominate less-experienced hitters in a way that just isn’t enough against big leaguers. We’ve seen this many times, where a polished pitcher who can execute a great changeup at the lower levels puts up outrageous K/BB numbers, but then struggles a bit to carry that over at Triple-A and above. That isn’t to say it DOESN’T carry over – obviously we see lots of big league pitchers with great changeups having success! – it is only to say that it’s something of an extra box to check that I look for with certain types of pitchers.
In the video, you can see how great that Santos changeup is, so I do wonder how well it would translate up the ladder. Then again, the fastball is LIVE on its own, and he does flash a decent slider, too. There would seem to be enough there, particularly given his story, that you’d really want to keep this guy in the organization. I don’t think it would take a 40-man spot to do it, but I suppose it’s possible that some other club will offer him one (in which case he’d have to take that offer over any kind of minor league offer from the Cubs). We’ll see. If the Smokies make a run from here, he could get one more start in the postseason, too.
