Johan Santana Trade/Signing

Johan Santana agreed on Friday to the largest contract ever awarded to a pitcher in Major League Baseball history, signing for six years and $137.5 million two days after being traded from Minnesota to the New York Mets. The Mets will inherit the $13.25 million owed to Santana in 2008, whereupon the freshly inked contract extension will kick in until a club option manifests in 2014, with a $5.5 million buyout. The deal exceeds the seven year, $126 million deal fellow left-handed starter Barry Zito signed with the San Francisco Giants last off season, and the average annual salary of $22.92 million surpasses the Cubs' Carlos Zambrano's $18.3 million, in relation to active pitchers.

Days upon being traded from the Minnesota Twins for minor league pitchers Kevin Mulvey, Philip Humber, Deolis Guerra, and outfielder Carlos Gomez, Santana becomes the ace the Mets have sorely lacked in previous seasons, including last year's epic collapse in the final weeks of the regular season, having lost a seven game lead in the standings with seventeen games remaining to the Philadelphia Phillies.

The combination of Santana's presence at the top of their rotation and the offensive potency of their lineup should make the Mets the prohibitive favorite and best team in the National League. Credit must go to general manager Omar Minaya for landing the (widely regarded) best pitcher in baseball without surrendering his best position (outfielder Fernando Martinez) or pitching (Mike Pelfrey) prospects in return. The addition of Santana not only remedies the loss of left-hander Tom Glavine (13-8, 4.45 ERA in 2007) to the rival Atlanta Braves, but also moves fifteen game winners Oliver Perez (15-10, 3.56) and John Maine (15-10, 3.91) down a slot in the starting rotation, while easing the pressure on a recovering Pedro Martinez (3-1, 2.57 in 28 IPs) to anchor the rotation in 2008.

The Minnesota Twins immediately take a few steps backwards by dealing the best pitcher in franchise history for four minor leaguers, only days after extending the contracts of homegrown position players Justin Morneau and Michael Cuddyer. In rookie GM Bill Smith's first off season as full-time general manager, he faced a difficult situation in having to trade away a two-time Cy Young Award winner one year away from free agency who just happened to hold a full no-trade clause, which would be waived only for a team willing to negotiate a new contract which would assume (correctly) to be the largest ever for a starting pitcher, as well as a team that made their spring training headquarters in Florida and close to Santana's off season home.

With that being said, and without any inside information from sources within MLB clubs, in my opinion Smith took the fourth best offer he was presented with in the process. With Santana's contractual and personal demands excluding the majority of teams besides the Mets, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox, it was perhaps Smith's willingness to prolong the trade negotiations and attempts to escalate the bidding war between the major market teams which resulted in the Twins getting perhaps only fifty or sixty cents back on the dollar in this trade. The Red Sox and Yankees both made relatively strong offers in the beginning of the baseball off season, with packages centering around OF Jacoby Ellsbury and pitchers Jon Lester, Phillip Hughes, and Ian Kennedy. While talk out of Twins camp was that the offers were not satisfactory and the team would consider entering spring training with Santana under contract, hoping to contend in 2008, January expired with a sense of urgency for the Twins, as they called the three teams asking for their final trade offers, hoping to deal Santana before pitchers and catchers were due to report. With the Santana saga having gone on for months without any real progress being made, it seemed the Red Sox and Yankees both pulled their best offers off of the table and were ready to call the bluff of the Twins to take the lesser package and ship Johan to the National League.

So instead the Mets were able to acquire one of best left-handed pitchers in recent baseball history for four players with a combined season of major league service time, two of whom were on their 40-man roster. Carlos Gomez will probably contribute to the Twins in 2008 as a plus-tools prospect with great speed and defense from center field, albeit with limited power and a contact approach at the plate, and Mulvey and Humber project as back end of the rotation starters, joining incumbents Kevin Slowey and Glen Perkins. Deolis Guerra, while 6'5" with a plus-changeup, lacks even an average fastball and is years away from contributing at age 18. With the money saved in dealing Santana and acquiring cheap, minor league players in exchange, the contract extensions (and overpaying) of 1B Justin Morneau and OF Michael Cuddyer suddenly don't seem as odd from notoriously cheap, billionaire owner, Carl Pohlad.