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Mets got more than just an ace in Santana

Ken Davidoff

February 7, 2008

Just as he was about to sign his name to this huge, next step in his baseball life last Friday, Johan Santana turned to his longtime agent, Peter Greenberg, with a question.

"Are they going to criticize this contract?" Santana asked, according to Greenberg.

Yet the two-time Cy Young Award winner didn't concern himself with the "I can't believe baseball players make so much money!" crowd. Rather, Santana wondered if he had let down his union brethren with his six-year, $137.5-million agreement with the Mets.

He didn't want people to think that he had settled for too little.

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"We just tried to pick a number that we felt he'd be comfortable with," Greenberg said yesterday as the Mets introduced their new ace at a packed Shea Stadium news conference. "That, at the end of the day, would be viewed as fair, and would be viewed as something that raises the roof sufficiently - so that other players like the [C.C.] Sabathias and whoever else comes along have a chance, if they accomplish things, to fill in that gap."

This might not come off as particularly virtuous to those of us who won't make in a year what Santana will make in his first 2008 start (about $593,750), but I respectfully disagree. In these eyes, it reflects Santana's pride and his competitiveness - after all, he is the best pitcher in baseball, and he does deserve the highest contract - and also his conscientiousness.

The Mets got themselves more than just an ace. They got themselves a warrior and a deep thinker. Someone who not only wants the rewards of greatness, but takes on the responsibilities of it.

But don't take my word for it. The next lie that Terry Ryan tells - even the next time the great, former Twins general manager so much as exaggerates - will be his first. Last March, when he still occupied the GM's office at the Metrodome, here's what Ryan said about Santana:

"Everybody knows his statistics. He's a better guy off the field. He's one of the good guys on the team. He's respectful of everybody, from clubhouse kids to teammates to front-office members ... He treats media well.

"Everything we believe in, everything that you'd like your high-profile guys to be - Morneau, Mauer, Nathan, Cuddyer, we've got good human beings - he's right up at the top. It's tough to do better than that. Those types of guys, when they're your best pitchers and your best leaders and your best human beings, that helps a lot of things."

In a way, Santana's pride and conscientiousness drove him out of Minneapolis and into Flushing. If you want to be the game's highest-paid pitcher and get a World Series ring, your options are somewhat limited.

"I told Johan, 'We could do the biggest contract in history [with the Twins],'" Greenberg said. "But you have no guarantee they're going to be able and compete. Teams like the Mets, Yankees and the Red Sox, you know they've got a track record. They're going to try to field a team that's going to try and win a World Series from the start, but at the halfway point, they're going to have the commitment from ownership to go and get someone else."

So the Twins dealt Santana to the Mets, and the lefthander played the arriving hero's role perfectly yesterday. If he lacked Pedro Martinez's playfulness, he displayed a maturity that surpassed his 28 years. He offered only kind words for the Twins. He called New York "the capital of the world." He spoke of his older daughter's fondness for the teddy bears at the FAO Schwarz in Manhattan.

Really, he was downright boring. "I'm going to have a good time out there," Santana said. "I'm going to go one step at a time. I'm going to take everything very easy. As far as the game, I'll be ready for it. I know what to do when I go out there."

If slight doubt existed in that negotiating room last week, it is gone now. Santana has huge dollars to earn and teammates to support. You got the sense yesterday that he understood the challenge he was undertaking, and that he can't wait for it to start.