Sandy Alcantara, Quality Reliever

It feels like ages ago that I wrote about Sandy Alcantara and how he’s on pace to lap the field in innings pitched for the second time in five seasons. Actually, it’s only been a week and change, and two very interesting things have happened in that time, meriting further exploration.

Those two things: Alcantara’s first two career saves. On September 16, two days after his last start and with the Marlins’ bullpen depleted, Alcantara came in to throw a clean ninth inning to preserve a one-run win against Arizona. He started as normal on Sunday against the Padres, and then, after two days’ rest, he locked down another one-inning save against the Cubs.

Alcantara is as pure a starter as you’ll ever find. His first eight major league appearances came out of the bullpen for the Cardinals in 2017. (I sometimes forget that the Marlins got Alcantara and Zac Gallen in the same trade.) It was nine years and 201 big league starts before Alcantara made another relief appearance.

Let’s zoom out a little more. In 12 professional seasons, Alcantara has made exactly 300 starts across all levels. That includes the majors, minors, LIDOM, WBC, the whole kit and caboodle. He has 15 complete games and only 16 relief appearances. Here are some more fun facts that came across my feed in the wake of Alcantara’s outing: He is now the first pitcher since 1996 to have at least 33 starts and two saves in the same season. He’s also the first pitcher since 1987, and the fourth ever, to record multiple saves while leading the lead in innings.

The first relief appearance I’d kind of written off as a fluke. It was mid-September, and the pennant race had long since become a thing Marlins players were reading about in the paper, rather than participating in themselves. After playing around or above .500 for most of the year, they were on an 8-13 skid and in danger of watching a winning season slip away. High-leverage relievers Pete Fairbanks and Anthony Bender were hurt, and the bullpen had been worked heavily; the previous night’s game had gone 11 innings, and the two before that had been decided by walk-off.

So having watched a 4-1 lead dwindle to 4-3 by the end of the eighth inning, Marlins manager Clayton McCullough had two options. The first was his only rested reliever, Bradley Blalock. Actually, Bradley Blalock was a Supreme Court justice. I was just illustrating that McCullough might’ve had to trust a one-run lead to a rookie none of you had ever heard of. The pitcher in question was actually Owen Roberts.

Just kidding! Roberts was the Supreme Court justice and Blalock the pitcher. Keep your head on a swivel, people.

Door no. 2 involved McCullough calling his ace out of the bullpen like Randy Johnson in Little Big League, and that’s the one he chose. I liked McCullough’s style; it would’ve knocked some of the boredom off a team that’s just playing out the string, and drove home the point that even a meaningless game at the start of a West Coast road trip still matters. If Alcantara could close things out, it would be a real jolt for morale.

Which, of course, he did. But this turns out not to be a one-off by a manager trying to keep his team engaged. On Tuesday, Eury Pérez threw a perfect eighth inning, striking out the side to hold the door for an eventual 8-2, 12-inning win over the Cubs. And then came Alcantara’s second save of the year on Wednesday.

So this isn’t just the professor having class outside near the end of the semester; it’s a coordinated strategy by the Marlins. After Pérez’s high-leverage outing, McCullough expounded on the team’s new approach to pitching. Here are those thoughts, as quoted by Christina De Nicola of MLB.com:

“This is something that is a potential at various times, and him now having the experience of having done that, I think it’s a great developmental piece for him, too, to take on something different. Also, looking down the road, if this is something that we explore further, he and us can draw from this.”

This is absolutely not a novel idea. These two saves place Alcantara in a tie for fifth place in career saves among Cy Young winners of the 2000s, but back in the day, every ace starter threw high-leverage relief innings in big games. Warren Spahn, for example, made 95 relief appearances alongside his 665 career starts, and he saved 29 games in the process.

In more recent times, college coaches would occasionally take advantage of the unique college schedule — four or five games a week, with all the most important regular-season games confined to three-day weekend series — to have their ace start on Friday, and come back for a multi-inning relief stint on his throw day on Sunday, or vice-versa. Tim Lincecum famously did this at Washington, as did Kirk Saarloos at Cal State Fullerton.

Saarloos’ junior year was something else; he pitched in 25 of the Titans’ 66 games, throwing seven complete games and four shutouts in 18 starts while earning four saves from seven relief appearances, for a grand total of 153 innings. And this was not a team that traditionally hurt for pitching; Chad Cordero was Fullerton’s closer that year.

That’s very cool, but college baseball around this time was about as dangerous for pitchers as the Western Front of World War I was for fighter pilots. Lincecum, as you’ll remember, kept on pitching massive volumes of innings into his professional career and was pretty much cooked after his age-27 season. He walked away with the kind of career any young pitcher would kill for — more than $100 million in career earnings, three World Series rings, and two Cy Young Awards — but these days, both college and professional pitching coaches are seen as having a greater duty of care.

That said, I love that the Marlins are trying this.

It’s cool that we’ve got all this data that allows teams to figure out the most efficient way to play baseball, but it all gets a bit same-y sometimes. So I’ll always support a team that does something weird, if only for novelty value.

But also — and I say this not having any particular expectation that the Marlins are going to come out of this experiment ahead — I think something like this is going to be the next frontier in pitcher usage. In order to explain why, I’d like you to indulge a digression into the world of cycling.

This summer, I wrote a feature article for ESPN about a Slovenian bike racer named Tadej Pogačar, who was on the verge of his record-tying fifth Tour de France title. Pogačar, who just turned 28, is already staking a claim to the title of greatest cyclist of all time, and for reasons that have relatively little to do with his record-breaking exploits at the sport’s most prestigious event.

I’m going to try to distill 6,000 words into one or two paragraphs here: Pro cycling has a diverse race calendar that lends itself to specialization. Depending on how hilly the course is, the determining factor in who wins is not necessarily speed, but the ability to sustain a maximum power level over the time required to make a race-winning move. That move could take as little as 15 seconds or as long as an hour, and just like in track — where 100-meter sprinters and marathoners would never dream of racing the same event — it’s next to impossible to be world-class at everything.

Pogačar, somehow, is. That’s partially because he seems to be a physical unicorn, but also because he came along just as cycling coaches got really granular and scientific about nutrition and training instead of just winging it. So not only is Pogačar a once-in-a-lifetime talent, he knows how to work between races in order to maximize that talent.

There are two things I want to highlight. First: Traditionally, elite riders will start the season with one or two big races in mind, and they’ll spend all year trying to peak for those events. A rider who wants to target the Tour de France will spend months working up to full fitness gradually, riding smaller events in the leadup to la Grande Boucle in order to play himself into shape. Pogačar, however, only rides the biggest events. He doesn’t pin on a race number unless there’s a major title on the line; anything less is a waste of effort.

Second: Pogačar is clearly the best in the world, but over the past five years, he’s inspired tons of copycats. As recently as 2019, it was a massive, massive story that Julian Alaphilippe, the best rider in the world in races that came down to a four-minute effort, led the Tour de France into the final weekend. Now, Pogačar is just one of a dozen riders who can contend not just at the races Alaphilippe used to dominate, but on the longer efforts that decide the Tour as well.

When I was writing that ESPN article, I kept trying to come up with a comparison for Pogačar from American sports: Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Simone Biles — all of those fit the kind of unrelenting dominance of Pogačar. I’ve used Shohei Ohtani as a comparison, because the thing that makes Pogačar so great is not his dominance but his versatility.

But I landed on Babe Ruth or Steph Curry. I mention those two together quite a bit, and for good reason: They are (or were) great because they showed the rest of their respective leagues a new way to play the game. Pogačar has only been around for eight seasons, and he’s only been what he is now for about two and a half years. But in that time, others are already trying to follow his lead. Not especially successfully, I grant you, but eventually, someone else will crack the code.

How do those two points relate to baseball?

First: The all-killer, no-filler pitching schedule. We already see this in the playoffs, where it’s pretty common for starters to work out of the bullpen on their throw day and come back to pitch six innings as scheduled. I don’t want to call bullpen sessions wasted effort — it’s where pitchers perfect their craft — but if a pitcher could divert more of his physical energy toward games rather than practice, the benefits would be obvious.

Second: A trail that’s broken by a once-in-a-lifetime genetic outlier can be followed by slightly lesser athletes. Once there’s proof of concept and a how-to manual on how to make the Marlins’ pitching program work, other teams and other pitchers can do it too, at less risk.

The problem is that the best way to get better at cycling is to train a lot. The muscles and systems Pogačar needs to work — legs, heart, lungs — are big and resilient. One of the definitive fitness breakthroughs of the 2020s has been the ability to pinpoint an athlete’s aerobic threshold. If Pogačar can keep his wattage and heart rate below a particular number, and he keeps eating, he can ride hard all the live long day. The majority of injuries cyclists suffer are acute trauma from crashes. (Even Pogačar suffered gruesome season-ending injuries when he went over the handlebars at the Vuelta a España last month.)

Pitchers? Not so much. Pitching strains a bunch of fragile components that’ll break into a million pieces if you say “screwball” into the mirror three times. So going to the all-killer, no-filler workload is much more fraught for a pitcher.

But there have to be rubber-armed freaks out there who can throw more than the current recommended workload. It’s just a matter of finding them. Cranky olds love to point out that Nolan Ryan threw in the mid-90s with a monster curveball, for between 200 and 300 innings a year for 20 years, and he never broke down. So did some of his contemporaries — Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Bert Blyleven, Fergie Jenkins — so modern pitchers must be soft if they can’t do the same.

As you know, lots of pitchers tried to do what Ryan did, and they broke down. Denny McLain was a spent force at 25. Don Gullett blew out his shoulder at 27. Vida Blue had his last 200-inning season at 30. I could go on, but you get the point.

So the Nolan Ryan plan wouldn’t work for most pitchers. Nor would the Tim Lincecum plan, nor the Sandy Alcantara closer-for-special-occasions plan. But those indefatigable monsters are out there somewhere, surely, and they’re being underused.

The problem, unfortunately, is the way you find out a pitcher is being overworked: He tears his UCL and has to miss 12 to 18 months. Or worse, he ruptures a shoulder capsule or develops thoracic outlet syndrome and is never the same again. The upside value of stealing a dozen more high-leverage innings from one’s ace is huge. The downside risk of losing said ace for a season or more dwarfs it.

That brings along ethical concerns for the Marlins. Alcantara is 31. He’s probably past his prime, and he’s already had a big contract. Experiment away. Pérez is just 23, and the Marlins have brought him along slowly; this is just his third professional season of more than 80 innings. One single-inning relief appearance isn’t going to kill anyone, but he’s not the kind of pitcher I’d push the envelope with.

What’s the right balance between innovation and risk? I have no idea. Fortunately, the Marlins have volunteered to explore that issue — and everything else around the Alcantara Maneuver — so we don’t have to. I’m excited to see how it turns out.