Five mind-boggling stats about Twins pitcher Ervin Santana

Somewhat lost in all the #dingers hit by the Twins in Tuesday’s 9-1 rout: Ervin Santana continued his brilliant start to the 2017 season Tuesday, throwing six shutout innings against Oakland to improve to 5-0 on the season with a minuscule 0.66 ERA in six starts. For a 34-year-old pitcher with a solid but generally unspectacular track record, it’s been quite a ride.

Let’s go a little deeper, then, to reveal five mind-boggling statistics about Santana, the hottest pitcher in MLB:

1) Per a tweet from the Twins last night, Santana became just the eighth pitcher in MLB history to begin a season with six consecutive starts of at least six innings pitched and one run or fewer allowed. Granted, that’s kind of an arbitrary stat tailored nicely to Santana since three of his starts have been exactly six innings, but anytime you start talking about a positive statistic that encompasses the entire history of a sport, you’re in good company.

2) Speaking of that six innings, one run (earned or unearned) figure: it is a good threshold for determining that a pitcher gave his team an excellent chance to win. Santana has six of those already. Phil Hughes and Hector Santiago have one each this year. No other Twins starter has any. So they have eight total, six courtesy of Santana, encompassing 33.3 percent of all games.

Last season, when the Twins went 59-103, guess how many of those starts they had. OK, stop guessing. The answer is 22. Santana led the way with five (so he’s already past that total this season). Tyler Duffey and Ricky Nolasco had four each. Kyle Gibson and Hector Santiago had three each. Tommy Milone, Phil Hughes and Pat Dean each had one. So out of 162 games, if we are using this as a measure of truly excellent starts, the Twins got one 13.6 percent of the time last season. Yuck.

3) But back to Erv. Per a tweet from Aaron Gleeman, since July 1 last season — roughly the midpoint of 2016 — Santana has the lowest ERA of many MLB starter who has pitched at least 100 innings. Santana’s number is 1.93 — reflective of how well he’s done this season but also a reminder of how good he was in the second half of 2016.

4) As eye-popping as Santana’s overall numbers are this season, this figure stands out: he hasn’t even allowed more than four hits in any start this season. He’s gone 2, 2, 1, 4, 4, 3 in his six outings. Those would be acceptable runs allowed totals. But those are hits allowed. Added up and it’s 41 innings and just 16 hits. Not surprisingly, Santana leads MLB with a .707 WHIP (walks and hits allowed per inning).

5) When Santana signed his four-year, $54 million contract before the 2015 season, it seemed like a lot of money (particularly for the Twins and particularly given Santana’s age). With the way he’s pitching, though, it seems like a relative bargain. Santana is only the 28th-highest paid starting pitcher in MLB this season at $13.5 million.

Santana is under contract for 2018 at the same price, and the Twins have a $14 million team option (or $1 million buyout) for 2019. Those numbers would be attractive to any team hoping to trade for Santana. But maybe (a big, early maybe) the contender he’ll end up pitching for down the 2017 stretch is the Twins?