NEW YORK – Early in Sandy Alcantara’s career, when he’d already made efficiency part of his identity, he got a tattoo of a baseball equation on the underside of his left wrist:
6
4
+3
__________
2
“I got it in 2019, I think, because I was getting a lot of double plays,” Alcantara said with a laugh at Yankee Stadium over the weekend. “And it’s still there.”
It’s still there – the ink, of course, but also the broader persona of Alcantara as one of baseball’s premier pitchers. The Miami Marlins ace, who starts at home on Tuesday against the Cincinnati Reds, has opened the season with 16 scoreless innings, including a 93-pitch shutout of the Chicago White Sox last Wednesday.
Last season, his first after Tommy John surgery, Alcantara slogged through his first 11 starts with an 8.47 ERA. Even he wondered if the Cy Young Award version of himself was slipping away.
“I’m human,” Alcantara said. “You never want to have ups and downs. But you never gotta lose your faith. You’ve gotta keep trusting yourself; it doesn’t matter what happens. I knew one day everything will change – and finally, Sandy’s back.”
For Alcantara, 30, the 2022 season was a lofty standard, a mighty oak that cracked through a time capsule to sprout in a field of saplings. Modern soil usually doesn’t support his kind.
In 228 ⅔ innings, Alcantara worked six complete games and finished with a 2.28 ERA. Only two other pitchers in this century have had a season with that many innings and complete games and a better ERA: Zack Greinke in 2009 and Félix Hernández in 2010.
The others to do it in Alcantara’s lifetime are Greg Maddux, Pedro Martínez and Roger Clemens. Those guys visited the ninth inning a few times, too.
“Sandy doesn’t like it when other guys take on his pressure,” said the Yankees’ Jazz Chisholm Jr., who played behind Alcantara for four seasons. “He wants it to be only him. He’s that type of dog that wants to lead and finish it. He has that old-school warrior mentality, like: ‘If I’m the king and I’m the leader, we’re going to die with me.’”
So who was that imposter in Alcantara’s uniform early last season? He was a right-hander wearing No. 22, but he couldn’t even get through six innings in 10 of his first 11 starts. For every four strikeouts, he’d have three walks. And even with all those base runners, only two batters hit into double plays.
Alcantara’s struggles underscored a harsh reality for many pitchers returning from Tommy John surgery: recovering their inner ace can take longer than they think.
“Early in the year, especially versus left, we just saw a lot of deep counts, we saw bigger misses than he probably historically had, and I attribute a lot to just the time away and how much time he missed with the surgery,” Marlins manager Clayton McCullough said. “His stuff was close to what it was late in the year as it was early, (it was just) his ability to execute and get ahead of people.”
In his last three starts before the All-Star break, Alcantara gave up 24 hits and 18 earned runs in 17 innings. He vacationed in Puerto Rico for a mental reset, leaving his 4-9 record and 7.22 ERA behind.
The ulnar collateral ligament, which he’d torn on his final pitch of a victory in September 2023, was finally stable. The sharpness, and the confidence that comes with it, was about to come into focus.
“The ’25 season for me was hard, fighting to be in Sandy Mode,” he said. “But the second half, I started feeling that I can do it. It was a good second half for me, and now, in the 2026 season, I’m doing great.”
Alcantara’s late surge (5-1 with a 2.68 ERA in his final eight starts) came after the trading deadline. Had he figured it out earlier, the Marlins – who aggressively seek future value – might have dealt him. Instead, they flirted with contention and have now posted a 55-45 record in their last 100 games, including 6-4 this year.
With a $21 million option for 2027, a full-strength Alcantara would command a major return in a trade this summer. Or, less likely, the Marlins could make him a fair-market extension offer and build around him. Asked about the latter possibility, Alcantara responded carefully.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m here. This is my team for nine years, so I’m feeling great about the opportunity that this organization gave to me. I can’t say much about it because I don’t know what they’re talking (about) out there.
“I’m just a player; I want to be out there and compete. But, I mean, I don’t know. If they want me to stay for more years here, I’m ready to stay. If they want to trade me, I’m ready to leave, too.”
Chisholm, who was traded to the Yankees in 2024 – a year after representing the Marlins on the cover of “MLB The Show” – said: “They’ll flip him. I hope he gets to stay there his whole career and become Mr. Marlin. That’d be cool. But we thought that was going to be (Christian) Yelich or (Giancarlo) Stanton, and look at where we’re at now.”
Under Peter Bendix, Miami’s president of baseball operations, the Marlins have used starters to acquire the kinds of high-impact, everyday position players they rarely chase as free agents: outfielder Kyle Stowers came from the Baltimore Orioles for Trevor Rogers, and outfielder Owen Caissie from the Chicago Cubs for Edward Cabrera. Dealing Alcantara, in theory, could bring a similar windfall.
Then again, the Marlins could simply keep Alcantara, see how this season plays out, and revisit his future over the winter.
In any case, Alcantara has only raised both his trade value and the Marlins’ hopes for the present. He fired seven shutout innings against the Colorado Rockies on opening day, then reached the same point against the White Sox at 79 pitches. When it took just five pitches to zip through the eighth, there was no stopping Alcantara from taking the mound for the ninth.
“Since the first inning, I was fighting to throw less than 10 pitches per inning,” he said. “So inning by inning, no conversation at all with my manager. Just back out there for the ninth and finish the game.”
McCullough said that he “definitely” could count on Alcantara for 200 innings again, as long as he follows his typical formula: filling up the strike zone and generating ground balls, usually with changeups and sinkers.
The 200-innings threshold is rare these days – only Logan Webb, Christopher Sanchez and Garrett Crochet reached it last season – but Alcantara’s benchmark is his alone.
He is the only pitcher to work 228 innings in any of the last eight full seasons. In the eight full seasons before that (2009-2016), it happened 43 times. If Alcantara has his way, he will stand tall again, in Miami or elsewhere, sturdier than all the rest.
“It doesn’t scare me,” Alcantara said of all those innings. “I was born to play baseball.”