He gets more smiles per hour

Ervin Santana had just won, again. Joe Saunders walked past him in the Angels clubhouse, enjoying an ice cream bar.

Santana teased Saunders about his selection of health food. Saunders shot back with a mischievous grin, suggesting Santana could stand to ingest a few thousand calories.

If Saunders had seen Santana eight years ago, he might have taken him on an emergency run to In-N-Out. Santana, then a teenager, had come from the Dominican Republic to Anaheim for a tryout.

Tony Reagins, now the general manager and then the administrator for the Angels’ minor league and scouting departments, measured Santana at 140 pounds.

“A skinny toothpick,” Reagins said. “I was wondering how a guy could throw that hard and be that frail.”

The Angels signed him anyway, betting $735,000 that his fastball and his physique would develop.

He’s 25 now. The maximum velocity on his fastball is up, from 92 mph to 95 mph. The weight is up, to 185 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame.

And, yes, that is a zero in the L column, one year after the Angels dumped him back into the minor leagues. It is a happy story that Santana is 5-0, a happier story that he is happy again.

He hails from the Dominican town of San Cristobal, which very loosely translated means the land of strong arms. Jose Rijo grew up there, as did Jose Guillen and Raul Mondesi.

“And Ubaldo Jimenez,” Santana said, reminding us not to forget the Colorado Rockies’ pitcher. “He throws 100.”

Santana, the son of a nurse and a clothing salesman, said he would have attended college if baseball had not worked out. The Angels offer English classes to Latin players; Santana embraced the lessons and now speaks a second language fluently.

That took time, of course. He played rookie ball in Utah, at 18, where the words on a menu did not help.

“I just used the pictures,” he said. “If I liked it, I just pointed to it.”

His rookie ball manager, Tom Kotchman, liked what he saw in Santana.

“He was a no-brainer as far as stuff,” Kotchman said. “He was similar to Frankie Rodriguez -- slender, really good arm. If you harness it, you’ve got something pretty special.”

Santana arrived in the majors in 2005, a midseason call-up at 22. He threw a shutout for his first victory, won 12 games in 23 starts and rescued an injured Bartolo Colon in winning the deciding game of the division series against the New York Yankees.

In 2006, he led the team with 16 victories. In 2007, he got pummeled -- on the road at first, eventually everywhere -- and even the oh-so-patient Angels sent him back to the minors.

He returned one month later, without his ever-present smile, and with a chip on his shoulder. He called reporters “all bad” and refused to speak with them in English.

And he won. He pitched well in September, even better in winter ball in the Dominican.

“He threw a no-hitter,” Angels coach Alfredo Griffin said, “against my team.”

The Angels talk a lot about how an adjustment in the delivery, a change in the hip turn, helped Santana recover his promise.

True, but an adjustment in his mind might have helped just as much.

“I had one bad year. Everybody kept talking about it,” Santana said. “They forgot what I did the past years. I won 12 games. I won 16 games. They were looking for something bad to happen.

“I don’t care anymore about last year. I forgot it.”

Said Angels pitching coach Mike Butcher: “It’s maturity. You’ve got to get past all those things and worry about what you can control. Last year was the first time in his career he hit a bump in the road. A lot of guys have a tough time getting through that, but it made him a much stronger person and a better pitcher.”

The Angels hoped for better from Santana, but they did not know. They offered him to the Florida Marlins in the Miguel Cabrera trade talks last winter. When they acquired Jon Garland, Reagins said, they penciled Santana in for the bullpen.

“I’m a starting pitcher,” Santana said, “not a reliever.”

The joy is back, and so is his smile. Walk into the clubhouse, and you might find Santana laughing amid the needling of Scot Shields and John Lackey, or lounging alongside Dominican countrymen Vladimir Guerrero and Erick Aybar. On an off day, Santana and Guerrero might get together to eat, or play dominoes.

“He blends well with the Latin players. He blends well with the American players,” Butcher said. “He can communicate with all of them. He’s a great teammate.”

Yet you can often find Santana sitting in front of his locker, by himself, sometimes listening to music on his headphones, sometimes just observing.

“He keeps a lot of things inside,” Butcher said. “He’s a private person, in a very respectful way.”

Ask Kotchman. He is the first manager for most of the players that climb through the Angels’ farm system, and he’ll share a funny story about any of them. He could not think of a story about Santana.

So we’ve got one for him. Santana is going to become a father this summer, for the first time.

“A baby boy,” Santana said, almost blushing.

There are responsibilities to come, of fatherhood and of citizenship. As an established major league pitcher, Santana said, he would like to organize a baseball camp for the kids of San Cristobal.

Rijo ran the camp that Santana attended. Now, Santana said, it is his obligation, for the next generation of hometown kids.

We’ll send along some ice cream bars.

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bill.shaikin@latimes.com