Sandy Alcantara, Quantity Starter

It’s been almost four months since one of my periodic check-ins on Sandy Alcantara. And everything’s going well. In May, I declared the 2022 NL Cy Young winner “part of the way back,” after he’d lowered his ERA from 5.36 in 2025 to 3.53 in his first 10 starts of 2026.

Alcantara has started another 21 games since that post, and the results have been similar, if not quite as good. Since May 21, Alcantara is 10-8 with a 4.01 ERA, with xERA and FIP marks in the low 4.00s as well. Even in 2022, Alcantara was never a big per-inning strikeout guy; he was fourth in the league in punchouts mostly on the strength of how many innings he threw. That year’s NL strikeout leader, Corbin Burnes, struck out 36 more batters in 26 2/3 fewer innings.

But Alcantara used his height and changeup and three-fastball combination to get lots of groundballs and allow basically zero homers. Thus: The no. 11 strikeout rate in the NL (out of just 22 qualified starters) led to the no. 2 ERA.

The Alcantara of 2026 is a different pitcher. Before, he was almost a mirror-image predecessor of his Dominican national team rotation-mate Cristopher Sánchez: Low arm angle, fastball with nutso arm-side run, killer changeup, zero hard contact. This year, Alcantara has eschewed his simple repertoire for a seven-pitch arsenal that includes not one breaking ball but three. The velocity’s down a little, and the strikeout rate is down a lot. Again, there are 22 qualified starters in the NL this year, and Alcantara is 20th in K%.

That said, Alcantara is still pitching deeper into games than any other pitcher in the league. He’s completed six innings in 26 of his 31 starts this year; no other starter has more than 23, and only seven others have 20. He’s gotten through seven innings a league-high 13 times; only four other pitchers have 10 such starts.

Alcantara has had to wear it a few times. He’s allowed four or more runs in 11 starts this year (including his past four outings), which is tied for the sixth-highest total in the league. But that’s not necessarily the result of the Marlins leaving him in too long. Alcantara has a 2.91 ERA and a .301 opponent wOBA his first time through the order, and a 2.98 ERA and a .272 opponent wOBA his third time through. It’s actually the second look — 4.48 ERA, .317 wOBA — that’s given him the most trouble. Maybe it’d be more accurate to say the Marlins are giving him more rope to pitch through early trouble than most starters get.

All of which is to say that Alcantara is kind of like Lady Gaga: The early stuff was incredible. The more recent stuff has been fine, but the volume is still cranked all the way to the end of the dial.

On September 8, Alcantara threw 4 1/3 innings against the Mets to become the first pitcher to hit 200 innings this season. I’m sure you can tell what’s coming next.

We all know that starter inning volume has decreased over time; just this past Friday, David Laurila had a roundup of big leaguers’ thoughts on the change in starting pitcher workload. What I like about this graph is that you can see the big historical inflection points: The introduction of the opener, the COVID-19 pandemic, Billy Martin’s death — the big changes in baseball that eased the workload on starting pitchers.

But that graph just accounts for ERA title qualifiers, not 200-inning seasons. In the early days of divisional play, there were as many as 65 200-inning starters per season. Up into the early 1990s, the norm was a little more than two 200-inning starters per team. In 2014, there were more 200-inning starters than major league teams; that hasn’t happened since, and the numbers have cratered in the intervening years. In a three-year span, from 2014 to 2016, we went from 34 200-inning pitchers to 15. Last year, there were only three.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Alcantara got there first, but nobody else has gotten there at all. At this point in the season (i.e. before game action started on Tuesday), there are about two full trips through the rotation left for most teams, but only eight pitchers with 175 or more innings pitched this season.

There’s some wiggle room left in the schedule; the Phillies or Yankees could reshuffle their rotations to line Sánchez or Schlittler up for Game 1 of the Wild Card round, rather than wasting bullets on a meaningless final-weekend outing. The Padres could theoretically cram a third regular-season start in for King if they need it to get into the postseason. All of this is guesswork, really, but the absolute theoretical maximum number of 200-inning pitchers this season is five, and that requires Schlittler going deep in both of his remaining outings and King throwing a complete game and getting two other eight-inning starts before season’s end. If I had to pick a number, I’d say Alcantara ends up in the high 210s, Sánchez gets over the line, and everyone else ends up in the 180s or 190s.

Here’s the upshot: Alcantara is going to throw more innings than anyone else this season, and the margin by which he’s going to lead the league in innings is gigantic. As of Tuesday, Alcantara leads the league by 17 2/3 innings over Sánchez. That’d be the biggest margin since 2022, when Alcantara led Aaron Nola by 23 2/3 innings. The margin now is an artifact of Alcantara’s being one day ahead of Sánchez in the rotation, but even a double-digit innings gap between first and second place would be remarkable. The last time we had one of those was 2022; the last time before that was 2003, when Roy Halladay threw 266 innings and second-place Bartolo Colon had 242.

Alcantara is on pace to finish with 11 2/3 more innings than anyone else in the league, and 32 more innings than 10th place. Both of those would be the biggest gaps since 2022; other than that, the last time the league leader in innings beat the 10th-place pitcher by more than 32 innings was 2008. That year, CC Sabathia started 35 games; it’s been 23 years (Halladay and Greg Maddux in 2003) since anyone started more than that in a single season.

Going by margin of victory in the innings race is instructive, but it’s worth looking at percentages as well. Last year, Logan Webb led the league with 207 innings pitched; Maddux threw a league-leading 202 innings 1994, when the Braves only played 114 games. Go back a little further and the innings totals get even more absurd. The two highest single-season pitcher workloads of the live ball era both came in the divisional era. Wilbur Wood threw 376 2/3 innings in 1972, which broke the record set by Mickey Lolich the year before: 376 innings on the dot.

Doesn’t your elbow hurt just thinking about that number?

So maybe it’s more constructive to think about Alcantara’s innings total in terms of a percentage of second place. He’s on pace to beat Sánchez by 5.7%, which is just outside the top 10 margins in the divisional play era.

Alcantara is on pace to end up 11th, though the margin could be much larger or smaller depending on what happens to him and Sánchez over the next two weeks.

I also wanted to compare the leader to 10th place (currently Gavin Williams, who’s on pace for 185 2/3 innings). There can be two outliers in a season — Wood’s record innings total isn’t even close to the most famous high-workload starting pitcher season in 1972. That’d be Carlton, who won 27 games for a 59-win team that year, earning him the first of his four Cy Young Awards. It’s less likely that there would be 10 outliers in a season; 10th place feels like a good shorthand for what’s expected of your garden variety no. 1 starter in a given season.

Wood and Niekro take five of the top six spots on this list, which strongly indicates that the key to lapping the field in innings is… does anyone want to guess? I’ll give you a hint: It starts with a “k” and ends in “nuckleball.”

Which makes for an amusing contrast with Alcantara. When he won his Cy Young, the book on him was that he threw harder than any starting pitcher in the league. This year, Alcantara is ninth in average four-seamer velocity among starting pitchers with 100 or more innings pitched.

I’ll list the eight guys ahead of Alcantara, because they’ve got something in common: Jacob Misiorowski, Bubba Chandler, Eury Pérez, Schlittler, Roki Sasaki, Walbert Ureña, Chase Burns, and Williams. The common thread: All of them made their major league debuts after Alcantara won his Cy Young. So did José Soriano and Paul Skenes, who were second and third in fastball velocity last year, behind Hunter Greene. Greene, who looks like Methuselah by comparison, reached the majors for the first time all the way back in 2022.

The wild thing is: 2022 wasn’t that long ago! Still, a whole new generation of fireballers has filtered into big league rotations en masse since then. Dozens of them at a time. Alcantara still throws harder than anyone he competed against in his prime, but the kids who came through in the past few years make him look like a knuckleballer, in more ways than one.