[caption id="attachment_17301" align="aligncenter" width="218" caption="All-star cast?"][/caption] Dr. Johan Santana operated on the heart of Mets fans last night. He applied the anesthesia of his overall career excellence to the patient. This put the patient into a deep sleep, confident in the doctor's track record to perform his duties superbly while we, the patient, remained in a trance. He cut and separated our sternum exposing our heart. Then he lobbed a stink bomb into our chest, which normally would be very bad for us. But fortunately for us his control was off and he missed. So we can smell it. It's undeniably on us. But it's not inside us. It is not a permanent part of our post-surgery bodies. With the passage of time and a few good scrubbings the terrible odor on our breast bone will become a distant memory. It will stink for a while but with the proper after-care we will eventually resume normal fandom. [caption id="attachment_17304" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="This guy keeps bouncing back, why can't we?"][/caption] During our recovery we will have plenty of free time. We should take advantage of that by doing some reading. I recommend baseball-reference.com as an excellent source of reading material, and the best part is it's free (heart surgery isn't cheap). As a part of my own recovery from last night I've been reading some of what they have to offer. Allow me to share some of it with you. Below are two tables. The first one is Santana's career first-half/second-half splits. Note that he is traditionally a good first-half pitcher but a great second-half pitcher. Pay even more attention to the second table. That is Santana's first-half/second-half splits for his 2004 Cy Young season. What's perhaps most relevant about that season is it followed off-season surgery to clean up Santana's elbow. He had a similar procedure prior to this season. Does that mean that his recovery will be the same? No, but it's reasonable to suggest that it might be. If nothing else the general idea that it might take him a few months to rediscover his old self seems fair. Feel free to check out Santana's game logs from 2004. Note that he threw quite a stinker in May of 2004. It was May 23 against the Chicago White Sox. He threw 3 innings giving up 7 runs on 10 hits, including 3 home runs, and 2 walks to leave his record at 2-2 with an ERA of 5.60. So let's not get too worried about last night. There is plenty of history to suggest that we and Johan Santana will make full recoveries.

 

ISplitWLW-L%ERAGGSCGSHOIPHRERHRBBIBBSOHBPWPBFWHIPSO/9SO/BB   1st Half 64 43 .598 3.46 186 134 5 3 979.1 855 406 377 118 281 8 994 22 34 4026 1.160 9.1 3.54   2nd Half 61 19 .763 2.73 130 105 4 3 764.1 608 252 232 74 203 2 768 12 31 3065 1.061 9.0 3.78

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 5/3/2010

ISplitWLW-L%ERAGGSCGSHOIPHRERHRBBIBBSOHBPWPBFWHIPSO/9SO/BB   1st Half 7 6 .538 3.78 19 19 1 1 123.2 101 54 52 18 31 0 136 4 1 494 1.067 9.9 4.39   2nd Half 13 0 1.000 1.21 15 15 0 0 104.1 55 16 14 6 23 0 129 5 6 387 0.748 11.1 5.61

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 5/3/2010.