{"id":313474,"date":"2026-05-29T04:50:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T04:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/313474\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T04:50:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T04:50:18","slug":"who-is-alimber-santa-astros-rookie-who-finished-off-no-hitter-in-mlb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/313474\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Alimber Santa, Astros rookie who finished off no-hitter in MLB"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 23-year-old had just been called up to the majors over the weekend and was making his big-league debut. Despite his appearance in last year\u2019s All-Star Futures\u00a0Game<\/a>, Santa wasn\u2019t thought to be among the franchise\u2019s Top 10 prospects, so he wasn\u2019t on a lot of of fans’ radars as far as who might be next in line to help the club.<\/p>\n

So, who is Alimber Santa?<\/p>\n

Santa has a variety of pitches in his bag, but, as a reliever is focused on his sweeper, slider and four-seam fastball, the three pitches\u00a0he used in his debut against the Rangers. He got his fastball up to 96.1, but it was the sweeper in the low 80s that looked the best. He threw it on 13 of his 24 pitches, getting six swings and two whiffs. It\u2019s also the game-ending pitch he threw that froze Brandon Nimmo for the final out.\u00a0\u201cI\u00a0did not know that there was that much sweep on his sweeper,\u201d an impressed Astros manager Joe Espada said after the win.<\/p>\n

The Santa surname has led to plenty of puns and jokes about the reliever riding in on a sleigh or delivering presents but Santa doesn\u2019t seem to mind. In fact, in his major-league debut, he wore a belt that, in addition to the Dominican Republic flag, also featured multiple Santa Claus faces and snowflakes.<\/p>\n

Santa has always had good stuff, but he\u2019s struggled with his control, especially with each step he made through the minors. In his first taste of Double-A, he walked 20 batters in 21 \u2154 innings in 2024. He got his walk-rate down to just 10% at Double-A in 2025, but when he was promoted to Triple-A later in the year, he walked 16 batters in 13 innings. He had walked just 7 in 19 innings at Triple-A this year when he was promoted and didn\u2019t walk anyone in his MLB debut Monday, throwing 16 of his 24 pitches for strikes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Santa received a $75,000 bonus from the\u00a0Astros when he was signed out of the Dominican Republic at 16 years old in February 2020. Starting at such a young age and with the pandemic wiping out the 2020 minor league season, Santa threw just 20 total innings in his first three years in the organization.<\/p>\n

An 18-year-old Santa drew a crowd when he threw his first live bullpen session at spring training in 2022<\/a>. General manager James Click, manager Dusty Baker, farm director Sara Goodrum and major league pitching coaches Bill Murphy and Josh Miller all were in attendance to watch the young right-hander throw his fastball that sat at 96-97 mph that morning. Elbow inflammation shut Santa down for the year, allowing him to throw just two innings in all of 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 23-year-old had just been called up to the majors over the weekend and was making his big-league…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[150,152,151],"class_list":["post-313474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arlington","tag-arlington","tag-arlington-headlines","tag-arlington-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}