rewrite this content and keep HTML tags
Carlos Santana is well into the immaculate grid portion of his 16-year career. After spending 10 of his first 11 seasons in Cleveland, Santana has played for seven teams over the past five seasons (including one last stint with the Guardians last year). On Tuesday, we learned that he will be joining his newest, and southernmost, franchise in 2026, as the veteran first baseman has agreed to a one-year, $2 million deal with the Diamondbacks.
With just 0.3 WAR and a wRC+ of 81, Santana is coming off the second-worst season of his storied career. He will turn 40 a week after the season starts. All of that makes him a perfect fit for a Diamondbacks team whose mantra was announced by owner Ken Kendrick back in September: “We will not be spending at the same level.” Kendrick has so far lived up to his word. RosterResource currently has Arizona projected for a payroll of $173 million, down from $188 million in 2025. Santana said last year that the Diamondbacks were interested in him before he decided to return to Cleveland, and he is a reasonable bounce-back candidate and a cheap option for a team that’s only interested in cheap options.
Right now, RosterResource shows Santana as the everyday Diamondbacks first baseman, with Pavin Smith and James McCann platooning in the DH spot (though McCann will also back up Gabriel Moreno at catcher). It also shows nonroster invite Ildemaro Vargas as the team’s utility infielder, which is to say that this doesn’t seem like a complete roster yet. The switch-hitting Santana seems likely to share time with the left-handed Smith at first, too, as previous rumors had Arizona connected to right-handed platoon first basemen like Ty France and erstwhile Diamondback Paul Goldschmidt. Over the course of his career, Santana has been better from the right side, running a 125 wRC+ as a righty compared to his 109 wRC+ as a lefty. Those splits have gotten more stark in recent years. Since 2021, Santana has an 87 wRC+ as a lefty and a 119 mark as a righty.
Earlier in his career, Santana was a truly excellent hitter. Over his first 10 years in the majors, he posted a 123 wRC+, falling below 115 just twice in that period. More recently, he’s been closer to a league-average hitter, with a combined 99 wRC+ from 2020 to 2024.
In 2025, back in Cleveland for the first time in five years, Santana got off to a hot start. Through June 1, he had a 121 wRC+. He made the Guardians look smart by spending $12 million on his one-year deal. However, from that point forward, he was, as the kids say, buns. After June 1, Santana batted just .184 with a wRC+ of 47. The Guardians released him in late August, and although the Cubs picked him up, they deployed him in just eight games as a platoon first baseman against left-handed pitching. We can’t even blame this downturn on a FanGraphs curse, because Ben Clemens waited to write about Santana’s hot start until June 6. (Well, maybe we can, because although his production had declined, Santana was still on a 14-game hitting streak. That streak died the day Ben’s article came out, so, yeah, it’s all Ben’s fault.)
I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know what the hell happened to Santana last summer. I haven’t seen any reports of an injury. In fact, he hasn’t hit the IL since 2022, when he was but a 36-year-old baby. When you split up his season stats, he just seems a little bit worse all around. He chased a bit more, which caused him to whiff a bit more, which caused him to strike out a bit more. He lost a tick of bat speed and exit velocity, along with 5.6 points of hard-hit rate. Although his attack angle and swing-path tilt barely changed, he got under the ball more, running higher fly ball and line drive rates. Normally, that’s a good thing, but he also started hitting more of those air balls to center and left field, where they were less likely to result in damage. In that story from early June, Ben wrote about Santana’s sudden ability to pull the ball in the air. That ability promptly abandoned him, and the results were ugly indeed.
You Aren’t a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren’t yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren’t logged in). We aren’t mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we’d like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won’t bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn’t sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don’t be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you’ll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we’ve also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn’t want to overdo it.
Understandably, the projections do not expect much from Santana in 2026. They see a guy who took an absolute nosedive in his age-39 season, and they don’t believe he will turn back into an above-average hitter again at 40. Further, because they never trust defensive excellence, even when it’s sustained for as long as Santana has sustained it, they think his defense will crater, too. How far should we trust these dark digital prognostications? This isn’t the first time that Santana has struggled in a major way. In 2021, he put up the worst season of his career, finishing with -0.8 WAR and a wRC+ of 81 in his lone year with the Royals. However, that year seemed to be an aberration, driven by batted ball luck (and maybe a stadium that wasn’t really suited to his batted ball profile). DRC+ and xwOBA graded his offensive performance as above average, and he bounced back the next year. That wasn’t the case in 2025. Santana’s .288 xwOBA and 98 DRC+ were the lowest marks of his career. He wasn’t just unlucky. He got worse in some important ways.
Still, that’s not usually how age-related decline works. You don’t just wake up one day in the middle of the season and lose everything. Halfway through the season, Santana was a productive hitter. When things started going south, his intercept point didn’t move deeper, so it’s not like he suddenly stopped being able to catch up to the fastball. His zone contact rate actually went up, so it’s not like he just couldn’t connect anymore. Moreover, Santana still put up decent plate discipline numbers, which led to good walk and strikeout rates. Whatever happened to him is scary, as is the sight of 41 candles on a birthday cake (one for luck, Matt!), but it still seems too early to assume that he can’t return to something approaching an average hitter, especially from the right side of the plate.
Santana also has one other important club in his bag. Even at 39, his defense at first base still graded out as impeccable according to all three major defensive metrics. First base defense doesn’t rack up that much value, but Santana is genuinely great there. Over the past two seasons, he ranks second in DRS and first in FRV. If he can just get his offensive production back in the vicinity of the league average, then he can be something like a one-win player. That’s still a bit of a roster hole for a Diamondbacks squad that hopes to contend for a playoff spot, but it’s not dragging the entire team down either, and the price certainly fits their budget.
