Who cares about Opening Day?

The coverage of Johan Santana's elbow has focused overwhelmingly on the question of whether or not he will be able to pitch on Opening Day. I am not agnostic on this question. I have a strong preference for "Yes," and the latest is that it is still possible and that's all to the good. But the focus on Opening Day specifically, as opposed to say Game 4 of the 162 game regular season, seems to miss the point.

I'm worried about Opening Day only to the extent that Santana's inability to make his first scheduled start would bode extremely ill for the total number of starts he makes. I don't care if he misses one, or which one it is, as long as he makes the vast majority of them. The Mets are in Cincinnati for their first series anyway.

It's good to hear that he and the Mets are trying to keep hope alive for Opening Day. And the fact that they have him throwing at all means the medical staff must be supremely confident that nothing is about to explode, but I'm still very worried. And I'll remain worried even if he makes his (all-important) Opening Day start and throws a gem. Something must have really scared Omar Minaya for him to give assurances to the Daily News that he still has minor league chips left to trade (say if the ace of the staff went down for the season).

And that elbow has a lot of miles on it for a guy who hasn't quite turned 30. Every year since he was 25, Santana has tossed at least 219 innings. Last year he threw a career high 234. Of course this is the "damned if you do" paradox of staying so healthy for so long, but you'd have to think that kind of workload eventually catches up even to durable players. And while his out pitch may be his change-up, he's not exactly a finesse pitcher, either.

In any case, the metric that people should be following is not % Chance of Making His Opening Day Start it's the Over/Under on starts for the season (I'd put it at 28 personally). They're related, but the former is only significant to the extent it changes the latter.

Not cool

Johan Santana pushed back from scheduled spring training start because of elbow tenderness.

Without Santana, the Mets rotation becomes Pelfrey-Maine-Perez-Garcia-Redding, or to put it another way, it becomes 40% filler and completely devoid of top quintile talent.

Here's hoping it's nothing serious.

Santana comes up huge on three days rest

Complete game shutout, three days after he threw 125 pitches over eight innings, dominating the Cubs. The game took just over two hours. The Mets are still mathematically alive in the division and within a half game of the Brewers for the wild card.

The Cubs just jumped out to a 2-0 lead on Milwaukee on a Daryle Ward home run. Sheets is pitching for the Brewers, so the Cubs may have to make that stand up.

Johan Santana still feels like a disappointment, but shouldn't

The bad news:

Year   K/9 K:BB
2005: 9.25 5.29
2006: 9.44 5.21
2007: 9.66 4.52
2008: 7.53 3.22

As you can see, the strikeout rate fell off a cliff this year, but the K:BB has been in continued decline since its peak in 2005, when he was 26 years old. Of course, even though he still came into this year on the good side of 30 he'd thrown over five normal-starter-seasons worth of innings in his last four years, so it wasn't unreasonable to expect (as a lot of people did) a falloff this year.

And fall off he did, but how badly?

Year    ERA  OPS  GB:FB
2005   2.88 .594   0.91
2006   2.77 .616   1.06
2007   3.33 .678   0.92
2008   2.75 .652   1.14

Those metrics paint a much prettier picture of Santana's Mets debut. The groundball improvement isn't massive, and he's still miles from Webb/Lowe territory, but it's enough to suggest that more of the lost strikeouts turned into weak dribblers than warning track flies.

A translated ERA metric would be helpful in dealing with the differences in home park and league/opponent quality, and it's probably safe to assume that both factors would make the comparison to the Minnesota years slightly less favorable, but BP only runs those figures annually so I don't know how much.

They do, however, keep VORP updated daily, and that metric (which measures how many fewer runs a team surrendered while a given pitcher was on the mound than they would have if those innings had been pitched by a minimum salary scrub) is adjusted for park/league effects.

So we can look at this list of the top 10 most run-preventing pitchers in the majors and conclude that, even though Omar failed to swoop in on Cliff Lee this spring when the Indians barely wanted him to show up to camp, he didn't exactly screw up when he ponied up for Santana:

59.4 Cliff Lee
56.4 Roy Halladay
53.9 Tim Lincecum
49.1 Johan Santana
48.6 Brandon Webb
47.3 Dan Haren
44.6 Ryan Dempster [!]
44.2 Jake Peavy
44.1 Ben Sheets
42.9 John Danks

Mets win, Santana doesn't

Johan Santana can't be happy at having started 24 games, thrown 161 innings of sub 3.00 ERA ball, and only having 9 wins to show for it. As was said, with some disapproval I think, on SportsCenter: "Cy Young voters require wins. You can't do it with ERA."

Well he got out of a jam but Scott Schoenweis became the latest Met to ensure he wouldn't get the W for an excellent 7 innings. And I'm not saying he should win the Cy Young, necessarily, and he isn't striking fools out like he did in Minnesota, but he's still been pretty unhittable.

Fortunately David Wright closed the deal in the 9th so there was a 2-out vulture win for Aaron Heilman. And the Phillies got shut down by Chris Volstad, wasting a nice start from Cole Hamels.

Los Mets are now two games out in the division and the wild card.

"Mets New Leaders in Santana Sweepstakes?"

That's the Yahoo headline I've been waiting all winter to see pop up in my RSS reader.

Instead I've been getting steady doses of Angel Pagan news and the thrilling drama of the Torrealba-Schneider musical chairs at catcher (the result of a Lastings Milledge deal which made them look stupid for not dealing him when he was still a glamor prospect).

Our pitching staff as currently constituted is an utter shambles. I'm on record saying that if we don't get Santana or at least two other decent arms, we will struggle to stay above .500 next year. But mostly what we need to do is get Santana. At any cost. This story reports that Omar was reluctant to trade Gomez and Martinez in the same deal. My response to that is "Tough shit." Pedro, El Duque and John Maine just cannot be counted on to hold down the fort.

Just give them what they want.