What’s Eating Sandy Alcantara?

Want a good example of how tough it is to pitch? Look at Sandy Alcantara. He was the consensus NL Cy Young last year, with a 2.28 ERA accrued across a whopping 228.2 innings. Stamina, command, grounders, and strikeouts: what more could you ask for? I had him 10th on last season’s Trade Value Series and if anything, the consensus feedback I received rated him even more highly.

Of course, the good times didn’t continue, which is why I’m writing this article. Alcantara has been downright ordinary this year – he came into last night’s game with a 5.08 ERA. He’s walking more batters, striking out fewer, and getting fewer grounders. He’s averaging fewer innings per start. Every single bright light in Alcantara’s 2022 performance has been dimmed this year.

The reason why isn’t particularly hidden: as Robert Orr documented back in May, Alcantara’s changeup is the culprit. It was his best pitch last year. By pitch values, it’s been his worst pitch this year. At the time, he was throwing it in the strike zone too frequently, and batters weren’t chasing the pitch when he left the zone. He wasn’t getting the same downward bite as last year, either, which helped explain the other problems.

Weirdly, none of that is true anymore. He’s going to set a career low in changeup zone rate by a sizable margin if he keeps up his current pace – 45.4% of them were in the strike zone last year, and only 37.2% this year. Opposing hitters are chasing more frequently when he leaves the zone and posting lower contact rates. That downward movement is back.

I came up with an article idea; I would watch Alcantara’s start last night, document a few reasons that his changeup was still hurting him, and use that as a springboard to examine what’s going on. Good news: he threw a ton of changeups, 35 in total. Bad news: I can’t tell what’s wrong with it, because he carved the Red Sox up over seven one-run innings. Good luck finding the bad parts of this:

Analyzing pitchers is tricky business. It’s not as though they’re either excellent or awful; pitchers having bad seasons still throw a ton of excellent pitches, and they even put together excellent games. Alcantara didn’t suddenly turn into a pumpkin overnight; whatever’s ailing him is surely on the margins.

In looking through previous games, I still think the biggest problem with Alcantara’s arsenal this year is his changeup. It’s not immediately obvious from the raw movement data; per Baseball Savant, the pitch looks essentially the same as it did a year ago:

Despite that, it’s getting worse results on the margins. Though opponents are swinging and missing as frequently as they did last season, they’re doing so less frequently with two strikes. When opponents do make contact, they’re hitting it harder and elevating more frequently. He might be hitting the shadows of the strike zone as frequently as he did last year, but opponents are swinging at those pitches less frequently. That’s partially a smart move by opponents, but it’s also partially a tiny loss of control. He’s locating his changeup just outside of the strike zone 30% of the time with two strikes, and just inside the strike zone only 13% of the time. Last year, those rates were 21% and 23%, respectively.

That might sound like a thin difference, but it matters. Hitting the outer edge of the strike zone with a hard-to-hit pitch is the best thing you can do as a pitcher; batters rarely hit it, but they have to swing. Missing by just a hair is still good – but it’s a lot less good. As you might expect, pitchers fare much better when they dot the corners of the zone. It’s a truly marginal change – an inch here or there – but it’s weighing on the strikeouts that Alcantara used to get, turning them into balls in play or extended at-bats.

Here’s the real lesson I’ve learned from poring over Alcantara’s performance this year: for a pitcher with his game, the margins really matter. There’s no shortage of sinker-heavy starters with low strikeout rates in baseball; it’s a time-honored number three starter profile. Alcantara isn’t a number three starter, obviously, and that’s because he brings a lot of extra skills to the table.

Which skills? Well, all of them. In 2022, he ran a 103 K%+; in other words, he struck out more than his fair share of batters. He paired that with a 68 BB%+ – lower is better in this one. In 2023, those two marks stand at 87 and 82, respectively. His K-BB% is still better than league average, but it’s gone from being elite to merely ordinary.

That sounds like a small thing. Strikeouts aren’t his superpower, after all. We’re talking about a guy whose principal skills are going deep into games and getting grounders. But it’s a lot easier to go deep into games if you’re getting free outs from strikeouts. It’s a lot easier to turn a steady stream of grounders into a solid outing if there aren’t baserunners reaching via walks. Grounders lead to more hits than fly balls, but fewer extra base hits. That’s a great deal when there aren’t a lot of runners on, but the bargain sours quickly as the bases fill.

This erosion in strikeouts and walks might not be such a big deal if Alcantara were still running a .262 BABIP, but he’s allowing a .294 mark so far this year, right in line with league average. That’s a change that Statcast’s expected metrics display as well. He’s getting fewer no-chance grounders, the kind hit directly into the ground in front of home plate. Last year, 38% of the batted balls he allowed were hit at an angle of -5 degrees or lower. This year, that number has fallen to 28%. Those are near-certain outs; losing those, again, hurts his effectiveness on the margins.

Which is closer to his true skill level? Truly, I’m not sure. 70% of the grounders he got last year were of that straight-down variety. Only Framber Valdez got more, and Valdez is a true outlier. The more grounders you get, the higher this percentage is likely to be – the reason Valdez has such a high groundball rate is that opposing hitters’ most frequent launch angles are extremely negative. But Alcantara was a unicorn; he ran a GB%+ between Kyle Wright and Martín Pérez, but got far more of these highest-value grounders than either of them.

I’m willing to believe that in 2022, something Alcantara did led to those juicy grounders. I’m just as willing to believe that whatever he did isn’t portable, that doing it in one year doesn’t mean you’ll be able to replicate it again. That’s a conclusion I’ve reached about a ton of things Alcantara does. His ability to locate his changeup just at the borders of the zone without leaking outside? He clearly demonstrated an ability to do so last year, and it’s just as clearly gone this year. His ability to limit walks by never missing when behind in the count? Again, he showed a unique talent for it last year, and this year it looks less definite.

The decline in those marginal edges explains pretty much all of Alcantara’s decline. The core of what he does is the same. But erosion around the edges matters a lot more for someone with Alcantara’s skill set. He racks up a ton of value through sheer volume, and he also provides a good rate not through one single overpowering skill but through an accretion of small advantages. When one of those skills falls back somewhat, it affects the sum of his production more than you’d expect.

That’s not to say that Alcantara is suddenly bad. He’s still great. But I think he’s more of a mid-3.00s ERA guy, true talent level, than his 2.99 FIP in 2022 might indicate. And half a run of ERA over 220 innings matters a lot. More than that, he can’t go as deep into games when he’s allowing more runs, so the innings edge he has over the rest of the league is declining as well. This kind of skill set – volume-first, without an outlier strikeout rate and relying on balls in play – just feels more tenuous as a consistent driver of value.

I’ve been thinking about this more than normal because I’m compiling this year’s edition of the Trade Value Series as I write this. Last year, I put Alcantara and Alek Manoah in the top 20 of the list, and I thought that both of them deserved a spot because of this very ability; they had a pile of above-average skills that turned into a meaningful advantage when taken as a whole. A few extra strikeouts here, a few more grounders beaten straight down there, and pretty soon we’re talking about seven-inning starts and value from durability.

Pitchers are, at times, at the top of their game. I don’t think anyone would argue with that premise. For guys like Alcantara, that form is awe-inspiring, because it comes with tremendous volume. Shave off the effectiveness slightly, though, and the volume starts to fall in tandem. The combined effect is devastating, because not only is their output worse, but they’re getting worse output over a less ludicrous workload, and both effects combine to lower the value they provide. It’s one thing if you’re Spencer Strider or Shane McClanahan; those guys get more value from the sheer rate of it all than from their durability, so losing a bit of their innings count isn’t quite so devastating. It’s specifically pitchers who are very good and also durable, but who aren’t blowing opposing hitters off the map even as they excel.

I don’t think I understood this effect as well at this time last year. Honestly, it’s a hard effect to explain; every pitcher has ebbs and flows of form, and it takes some flexible thinking to wrap your head around the fact that those changes in form affect different guys differently. I’m not even sure I’m grasping the ramifications correctly; is Alcantara the type of pitcher most affected? How likely is it that he gets back to the excellent form he displayed in the past? I simply don’t have the answers to those questions.

For now, I’m making a blanket adjustment to my evaluation of players: the guys who operate on the margins and provide value through volume will all go down somewhat in the rankings. I’m not sure this is the right conclusion; those innings really do have value. I do think that we’re prone to overreactions, though. There’s a multiplicative effect when someone like Alcantara is on; he was downright excellent last year, and excellence over the kind of volume he can deliver is rare. But the downside is that changing the rate by just a little bit hurts the overall package more; a huge volume isn’t quite so impressive when the rate goes from great to good.

More thinking is required. But I’ll just say this: we all know that sometimes pitchers just have it. I think that has implications for how we evaluate innings eaters who seem to “have it” at the moment. You have to think of the sum of their career, the starts, months, and even years where they won’t be quite as locked in. Alcantara is a great example of this effect. It doesn’t mean he’s not great – it just means he’s not going to put up a 2022 campaign every single year.