Sandy, the ERA’s Rising Behind Us

Sandy Alcantara was supposed to be the last bastion of the traditional starting pitcher, the guy who pumps gas seven innings a start come hell or high water. The stoic, hirsute antidote to the effete, three-ply soft five-and-dive starter of today. In his 2022 Cy Young campaign, Alcantara threw more innings than any other National League pitcher since 2015, and he did it while throwing harder than any other starter in the league that year. Oh yeah, man, that’s the stuff.

A mildly disappointing 2023 ended in a torn UCL, which prevented Alcantara from participating in a rare Marlins postseason appearance. But he’s back now, ready to remind the world what 220 innings a year looks like.

Through six starts, the Miami ace has an ERA of 8.31. His strikeout rate is down to 15.8%, which is about two-thirds of what it was at his peak, and his walk rate is 14.2%, which is so bad you don’t need context to appreciate it.

Hachi machi.

This early in the season, even an ERA as high as 8.31 isn’t necessarily an emergency. All season long, Alcantara has allowed 24 runs. A couple bad calls, a couple bloop hits, maybe one 40-pitch first inning, some bad sequencing luck — the fluky stuff can add up pretty quickly, and in only six starts there isn’t much time for it to even out.

But Alcantara has been pretty consistently poor this season. He’s allowed multiple earned runs in every start, walked four or more batters three times, and he’s pitched into the sixth inning just twice. His last time out, on Tuesday night against the Dodgers in Los Angeles, Alcantara allowed three runs in the first inning, one in the second, and three more in the third inning, which he did not finish. If a series of one-run innings is a picket fence, I posted on Bluesky to crickets from the audience, the Dodgers put up an art nouveau balustrade against the 2022 Cy Young winner. The game got so out of hand so quickly, both teams had a position player pitch.

Despite his best-in-baseball four-seamer velocity, Alcantara never put up bonkers strikeout numbers, even when he was winning awards and so forth. Two things worry me here: Alcantara’s command and the quality of contact he’s giving up. I already mentioned the 14.2% walk rate; Alcantara is also running a .426 opponent xwOBACON (it was .315 in his Cy Young year) and a 6.39 xERA.

In most cases, it’d be encouraging to see that a struggling pitcher was underperforming an ERA estimator by two runs. Surely this is bad luck, and all will be forgiven soon. Not so much here. The headline figure is that, even in a small sample, Alcantara is allowing an xERA of 6.39. That’s really, really bad!

Even coming off Tommy John surgery, Alcantara’s velocity is still there. He’s throwing his four-seamer maybe half a mile an hour slower than he did in 2022 and 2023, but he’s getting slightly more spin and movement. I’ll call it a wash; either way, if you can’t live at 97 with 15 inches of arm-side run, you ought to get out of show business.

At his peak, Alcantara threw four pitches — a four-seamer, a sinker, a slider, and a changeup — in roughly equal proportions. In 2025 (well, more like September 2023, but that was just before he got hurt), he’s added a curveball.

I’m kind of lukewarm on the idea of Alcantara throwing a second breaking pitch, especially this mid-80s curve that’s got well below-average movement in both axes and offers little variation from his slider in any respect. Then there’s the danger of the two breakers blending into each other. For the record, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. Even though Alcantara’s slider is spinning faster than ever and is actually breaking slightly arm-side this year, it always had pretty strict up-and-down movement.

If you’d told me that Alcantara’s curveball was a disaster, and more or less solely responsible for doubling his ERA, I would’ve believed you based on the spin and movement numbers alone.

Except: The curveball is the only pitch that isn’t getting hit hard. And it’s one of two pitches of his — the changeup being the other — that isn’t getting absolutely crushed.

I’m open to the possibility that there is something in Alcantara’s pitch mix that’s causing a negative interaction, or that minute differences in spin rate or movement are making him more hittable. But not to this extent.

The same goes for his mechanics. Alcantara has been pretty consistent with his windup and position on the mound; he starts with his right heel way over on the left side of the rubber, just like he did in 2022 and 2023. His arm slot is a couple degrees lower this year than it was in 2022 and 2023, which probably explains the different shape on his fastballs, but it’s only by a couple degrees. The difference is almost imperceptible on film.

Alcantara has been so bad this year I almost don’t want to attribute his misfortunes to a single cause, but the starkest evidence I can find of a breakdown comes in a critical spot: His command has backed up, and badly.

After running Zone% numbers in the 53% range for almost all of his career, Alcantara is throwing 51.8% of pitches in the zone this year. That’s not especially troubling in and of itself, but PitchingBot downgraded Alcantara’s command from a 62 in the two seasons pre-Tommy John to a 48 so far this year. If you look at Location+, he’s gone from a 105 in 2023 to an 89 in 2025.

In his Cy Young year and thereabouts, Alcantara had elite velocity and threw incredible arm-side stuff (changeup and sinker) in a tremendous volume of innings. But he was never at the top of the table in terms of either missing bats or generating weak contact. He was just average or better at basically everything, and over 220 innings a year, those small successes add up.

The one thing Alcantara could do better than almost anyone in the league was get hitters to chase. They chased more than a third of Alcantara’s pitches outside the strike zone in 2021, 2022, and 2023. In all three of those seasons, Alcantara’s chase rate was in the 94th percentile or better.

This year, Alcantara’s opponents have swung at an even 25% of pitches outside the strike zone, which is in the 23rd percentile. And when he’s throwing pitches in the strike zone, he’s gravitating more toward the middle of the plate. Alcantara’s meatball rate — pitches thrown middle-middle — is up from 7.2% in 2023 to 8.8% in 2025. His percentage of pitches in the Heart attack zone is up from 27.2% to 29.8%. And when hitters swing at pitches in that zone, their xwOBA is .475, up from .327 in 2022.

Sometimes, after a long layoff, command is the last thing to come back. A pitcher who’s used to throwing as much as Alcantara might be especially prone to developing rust. Maybe Alcantara is just a little off, like a soccer player who’s just come back from a torn ACL, and needs to play his way back into sharpness.

If that’s the case, this is a non-story. The Marlins aren’t going anywhere this year, with or without Alcantara. And he’s signed through next season. If Alcantara can return to pre-injury form by the end of this season, everyone will have long forgotten about his ugly April by the time he hits the trade market, the free agency market, or both.

And it had better be rust. Because if Alcantara’s doing all the same stuff he was doing in 2022, and is getting crushed anyway, that’s an even bigger problem.