Unanimous pick Santana was 20-6
In what has to be one of the true feel-good stories of this past baseball season, li’l ol’ Minnesota’s Johan Santana is this year’s AL Cy Young Award winner.
Twins lefthander Johan Santana, who just completed his first full season as a member of a starting rotation, reached the pinnacle of his profession today when he was unanimously voted the American League Cy Young Award.
Santana got a perfect score of 140 points, based on a 5-3-1 scoring system for first-, second- and third-place votes from the 28 American League votes. Boston’s Curt Schilling, cosidered Santana’s main challenger for the award, was a distant second, receiving 27 second-place votes for a total of 82. The Yankees’ Mariano Rivera was third with 24 third-place votes and 27 total points.
Twins closer Joe Nathan received one third-place vote and was tied for fourth with Boston’s Pedro Martinez and Anaheim’s Francisco Rodriguez.
The award caps a stunning season in which Santana didn’s lose a game after July 11. He finished 20-6 with a 2.61 ERA, the first Twin to win 20 games since Brad Radke in 1997. He led the American League with 265 strikeouts and held opponents to a .192 batting average.
All this from a guy who didn’t join the Twins’ rotation for good until the second half of the 2003 season. As a starter, Santana is 39-16 with a 3.30 ERA in his career.
Santana is the third Twin to win a Cy Young Award, after Jim Perry in 1970 and Frank Viola in 1988
Santana is one of the reasons I was so proud to be a Twins fan this season. Once again, the Twins put together their usual collection of castoffs, prospects, and middling talents, and once again they competed. Every season they seem to find a way to get it done. If they could just find a way to get over the Yankees, they might just do some real damage.
It would be nice to see the Twins hang onto Santana for awhile, perhaps even build a team around him. He deserves it, and the fans in Minnesota deserve to have a winner. Until the past few years, Twins fans put up with year after year of constant and unremitting losing. Now that Terry Ryan and Ron Gardenhire seem to have found a way to cobble together a winner on a regular basis, it’s fun to watch the Twins again. Even when they don’t win, they play the game the way it’s supposed to be played, and they’re fun to watch. Going to a game in Minneapolis was on of the highlights of my summer. I may not be a fan of the Metrodome, but I do love my Twins. It’s just too bad that I’ve chosen to live so far away.
