Johan Santana, set to destroy

August 20th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

That right there is video of Johan Santana’s ridiculous outing yesterday, in which he retired the first 12 hitters he faced, allowed two hits, and struck out 17 Texas Rangers in eight innings of work. There’s a decent chance, if Santana would have stayed in for the ninth inning, he could have hit 20 K’s.

As I briefly mentioned yesterday at the FanHouse, Santana’s virtue, to me, lies in the clinical dissection of hitters. He has a good fastball, but it doesn’t blow anyone away; he relies more on location, on pitch choice, and on a perfected routine of making hitters guess in difficult counts. The video makes that clear: very rarely does Santana get someone out with an overpowering high fastball, the kind both competitors know is coming. The fact that Santana seems borderline bored on the mound, even while he’s running through lineups like Kerry Wood in Rookie League, is the scariest part of the man’s considerable aura.