Sandy Alcantara Off To Poor Start, Imperiling Marlins Present, Future

No, the Miami Marlins were not one of the majority of MLB clubs entering 2025 with designs on a playoff spot. They were well aware of their lot as non-contenders, and entered the season with an everyday lineup filled with career minor leaguers with limited upside.

Ditto their starting rotation, with a couple of major exceptions. Youngster Eury Perez has a fairly extreme ceiling, and is in the midst of rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. By midseason or so, he could be ready to take the ball in major league games that count. Despite a lengthy rehab, he just turned 22.

Then there’s recent staff ace and 2022 NL Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara. He too underwent Tommy John surgery, in October 2023, and at age 29 took the ball on opening day of this season. To put it mildly, things haven’t gone quite as planned in his first six starts.

2-3, 8.31, with an ugly 19/17 K/BB ratio and 26 hits allowed in 26 innings. There’s simply no way to spin those numbers positively, and the eye test has been at least as alarming. A typically insightful “MLB Now” segment the day after his most recent start featuring Al Leiter with host Brian Kenny and Joel Sherman about summed it up – as much as anything else, the sheer volume of non-competitive pitches thrown in his last outing against the mighty Dodgers is cause for concern.

So where have we come from, where are we now, and where might we be going with regard to Alcantara? Remember – there’s a huge elephant in the room here. Alcantara’s greatest long-term value to his club is as a trade asset. He’s guaranteed $17.3 million this season and next, with a club option for $21.3 million in 2027. If he’s an ace, that’s a bargain, and he could bring a much-needed haul to the perennially rebuilding Marlins. But if he is what he currently appears to be…..well, that’s another story.

Alcantara may have won the 2022 Cy, but my batted ball-based evaluation system didn’t consider him particularly deserving. He would have been 5th on my hypothetical ballot, behind Aaron Nola, Carlos Rodon, Corbin Burnes and Max Fried. He was exceedingly lucky on grounders that season, with a 59 actual, Unadjusted Grounder Score compared to a much higher 108 adjusted mark. Overall, his 76 “Tru” ERA- about equaled his 77 FIP- and was way above his 58 ERA-. He made a run at NL Contact Manager of the Year honors (Fried prevailed), with an 84 Adjusted Contact Score. His ability to rack up grounders and minimize liners and walks while muting contact authority of all types made up for a middling K rate.

In 2023, Alcantara when slightly backward in many respects. His K rate dropped from 23.4% to 19.8%, over a half standard deviation below league average. His grounder rate remained high and his liner rate low, though both crept in the wrong direction. Despite all those grounders, his contact management performance was basically average (98 Adjusted Contact Score), and his “Tru”- checked in at 93, right in line with his ERA- and FIP- (both at 94). My methods had him as the 14th best qualifying NL starter.

Then injury struck, putting him on the shelf until this 2025. In spring training, we heard a lot of talk about the resurgence in his velocity to pre-injury levels. And sure, when you’re a guy who bumps 100 mph with both of his fastballs and sits in the upper 90s, that sounds impressive. But his velocity isn’t all the way back – all four of his primary pitches, his four-seamer, sinker, changeup and slider have all lost at least a full mph since 2023. That’s not insignificant.

And let’s drill a little deeper into his arsenal to get a better feel for his overall pitching profile. In 2022, 2023 and 2025, he has never thrown a single one of those four offerings more than 30% of the time. He really doesn’t own a go-to out pitch – he relies on the interaction among all four.

Each season I issue pitch grades for all of the qualifying offerings of every MLB starting pitchers with 135 or more innings pitched, based on their bat-missing and contact management performance relative to the league. All four of his pitches got “B” grades or better in both 2022 and 2023, but only two (his changeup in 2022 and his four-seamer in 2023) got “A” grades. The sinker got a “B+” in 2022, the slider did the same in 2023. The rest were average “B” grades. This shows that any of his pitches has flashed above average at one time or another, but just as importantly, their respective floors were at the league average level.

While Alcantara has a reputation as more of a contact manager than a bat-misser, he showed bursts of excellence in both disciplines in 2022-23. His four-seamer was an above average bat-misser in 2022 and 2023, while his changeup also was in 2022. His changeup, sinker (both in 2022) and slider (in 2023) stood out with regard to contact management at one time or another.

Now it’s too early to run any meaningful contact management numbers for 2025, but we can make some cursory conclusions based on some surface level numbers. After never allowing higher than league average exit speeds on any batted ball type in 2022-23, he’s allowing higher than league average authority on flies (95.0 mph), liners (96.4 mph) and grounders (87.3 mph) in 2025. His liner rate allowed is way up. He’s allowed 10 of his 24 hits with his sinker, his second most frequently used pitch. And he’s allowed six hits – half for extra bases – with his four-seamer, his third most frequently used pitch. That’s pretty concerning.

The bat-missing trends aren’t good either. Alcantara’s overall swing-and-miss rate was 12.3% in 2022 and 12.2% in 2023. Pretty good for a pitcher with an ordinary K rate. Lots of swings and misses, plenty of weak contact works. This year, his whiff rate is down to 10.6%, and the biggest issue surrounds his most important pitch – his four-seamer.

While the four-seamer is the game’s least effective pitch, and overall usage has been trending downward for years, the great ones have great fastballs. So even though Alcantara took a slight step backward in 2023, the emergence of an “A”-grade fastball was heartening and gave me good feelings about his future. His pitch-specific whiff rate had climbed from 10.8% in 2022 to 14.2% in 2023.

Well, it’s sitting at 6.2% thus far in 2025. If you could localize all of his issues down to a single number (beside the walks), this would be it.

There are plenty of questions to be asked here, and some should be directed at Marlins’ GM Peter Bendix. Was Alcantara ready for a full workload as of Opening Day, or was the club perhaps a little too aggressive to get him off to a good start and enhance his trade value? Sure, his velo looked good in the spring, but was he stretched out to the level one expects of their #1 starter?

Pitchers have been in Alcantara’s situation many times before. Some take a while to bounce back – but do – others continue to struggle, and some re-injure themselves. Heck, just last year Garrett Crochet got off to a terrible start with the White Sox coming off of TJ, righted himself and then got dealt to the Red Sox for a king’s ransom at the deadline. This could go in any number of directions.

But all eyes will be on Alcantara when he makes his next starts, when the opposition isn’t as formidable. A lot is at stake for both player and team.