Twins 5, Padres 2: Today’s Santana Channels Some Johan, Some Danny

Ervin Santana has had a fun year to watch. He’s Mr. Unpredictable, yet the outcome is more often good than bad. Some days he’s a strikeout machine. Others, a pitch-to-contact wizard whose sorcery defiles all logic of BAbip. And then there’s the times he gets bashed like a bachelor party pinata, just to stir things up.

And then today he goes pure-dee slugger! With two outs during inning numero Dos, Miguel Sano on third and Jorge Polanco on second, the Padres wisely walked Jason Castro to face Santana. Yeah, he so singled in two runs. Eduardo Escobar would later punch in two more. Sano added a solo dong later, which proved to be unnecessary, although I’m sure Bigg Migg enjoyed it.

The Padres got a two-run shot from young Jose Pirela, but this was Santana’s game. He ended up going all nine — impressive anytime, much more so with National League rules. Nine strikeouts. Four hits, one walk. Still want him traded before next year?

Here’s Santana’s RBI single on video. Dick Bremer calls it a double before correcting himself. Understandable mistake, as a single by a pitcher is pretty supercool, like doubles are.

Thanks to myjah for putting up the GameThread, I thought this would be at 9:00 like yesterday. All these West Coast games are melting what’s left of my brain. I really do enjoy interleague play, as I like learning about other teams we usually don’t see, but I think a case could be made for scrapping the “play your RIVAL plus a bunch of teams from one division” thing. Just play some random opposite-league opponents. As community member Nick has pointed out, this would be an ideal year for the Twins and Cardinals to match up and salute the old-timers from 1987.

And thanks to WestRiverTwinsFan for trying to keep the comment thread alive! It gets hard to do later in the season. Robot Roll Call: