Jim Rassol-Imagn Images

Last year was a rough time for the best pitchers of the early 2020s. Zac Gallen cost himself untold tens of millions of dollars with a brutal walk year. Aaron Nola got hurt, and even when he was available, he was little more effective than a batting practice machine. Spencer Strider made 23 starts, but nearly doubled his FIP from his 20-win campaign in 2023.

Sandy Alcantara, like Strider, was coming back from a torn UCL that wiped out his 2024 season, he also had a rough go of it. Alcantara’s ERA was over 7.00 at midseason, leaving the Marlins unable to cash in on their former Cy Young winner at the trade deadline. Even with a strong stretch run, Alcantara ended 2025 with a 5.36 ERA, and an xERA and FIP in the mid-4.00s.

The first 10 starts of Alcantara’s 2026 campaign, however, have been much better. He has a 3.53 ERA, a 3.32 xERA, and a 3.51 FIP. He’s no longer the best pitcher in the league, but because he’s back to pitching deep into games, he’s around the top 20 in WAR among qualified starters. If you’d told the Marlins a year ago that this would be the case, I think they’d have taken it.

In 2022, we were between generations of starting pitchers; Justin Verlander was the unanimous AL Cy Young pick, and Alek Manoah, Nestor Cortes, Julio Urías, and Kyle Wright all got down-ballot votes. Tarik Skubal was in his pupal phase of development, Paul Skenes was still at the Air Force Academy, and Jacob Misiorowski was in community college. Alcantara got out-FIPed and out-WAR’d by Nola, but with a 2.28 ERA over 228 2/3 innings, he lapped the field by any logic that valued runs allowed.

Playing for a bad Marlins team, Alcantara didn’t get picked over in the national press too much. The two things to know back then were, first, the huge volume of innings, and second, he had massive fastball velocity. Along with Strider and Hunter Greene, Alcantara was one of the hardest-throwing starters in the league.

The real key to Alcantara’s success is a little more complicated. The four-seamer wasn’t just fast, it also had wicked arm-side movement. So did his sinker, which had enough drop and run to separate it from the heater. And then came a hard riding changeup — quite literally the best offspeed pitch in the league by 10 runs that year. When Alcantara needed something with glove-side movement, the closest thing he had was a slider (Baseball Savant calls it a cutter) with gyro spin. In absolute terms, it had no movement, but compared to the sinker it looked like he was pulling the rug out from under the hitter.

Alcantara is no longer the best Dominican starter in the NL East with a low-three-quarters arm slot and the physiology of a lamppost, who gets by on wicked arm-side movement, an elite changeup, and a slider that only nods at moving glove side. In other words, this is the blueprint for Phillies lefty Cristopher Sánchez, only right-handed and with two fastballs and a harder slider.

Isn’t that a fun coincidence?

The interesting thing about Alcantara, even back then, is that he was never a big swing-and-miss guy. His Baseball Savant page for 2022 is full of red bubbles, but he was only average in both whiff rate and strikeout rate. And post-Tommy John, he has only gotten less whiffy. As I write, he is 69th out of 75 qualified starters in strikeout rate, which puts him between Dustin May and Keider Montero.

So what’s changed? Why is Alcantara worse than he was in 2022 but better than he was last year?

To some degree, Alcantara is swimming against the current here; his average fastball velocity has dropped from 98.0 mph in 2022 to 97.3 mph, while the league-wide average velocity has climbed from 93.8 mph to 94.6 mph across the same span.

The other thing is that Alcantara has expanded his repertoire from four pitches to six. In 2022, he threw all four pitches to everyone, but he was mostly fastball-changeup to lefties and sinker-slider (or cutter) to righties.

Now, Alcantara is throwing three versions of what I’d call a slider. There’s the cutter from the olden days, a true slider that he introduced last year, and a sweeper.

And even then, he’s changed some things around. In 2022, the cutter had a 19% active spin rate; this year, it’s up to 34%, even though he’s throwing it at around the same velocity. Alcantara’s slider had about four more inches of drop when he started throwing it last year; now he’s traded about four inches of vertical break for an extra inch of horizontal break.

That plays into the sweeper, which is slightly slower on average than the slider, but it has genuine glove-side movement: 11.4 inches of it. This is the first time since 2020 that Alcantara has thrown a pitch with more than four inches of glove-side break. Once the king of arm-side power, Alcantara now has two clouds of movement he can draw on, one to each side of the plate.

With the addition of the sweeper, I would think that Alcantara would be better off throwing last year’s downward-breaking slider, but he tried that last year and opponents slugged .495 off it. This year, they’re slugging .270 with a .199 wOBA against the slider. The sweeper is getting killed (.556 SLG and .360 wOBA), but the underlying numbers say that’s a fluke. Alcantara’s sweeper is getting the highest strikeout rate and second-highest whiff rate of any of his pitches, and opponents have a .099 xBA, .294 xSLG, and .216 xwOBA against his newest breaking ball.

By diversifying his breaking pitches, Alcantara is faring much better against right-handed batters (.259 opponent wOBA, down from .309 a year ago), and in general, he’s allowing much less hard contact.

Which is kind of what you have to do if you want to bounce back from a bad year without striking anyone out. Since last year, Alcantara’s average exit velocity has dropped from 90.7 mph to 88.3. His barrel rate is down by a third, and his HardHit% is down almost 90 points, taking him from the bottom quartile of the league to above average in all categories. Alcantara was never a profligate dispenser of home runs even in his dark days, but his home run rate this year is half what it was in 2025.

Is this… I almost don’t want to say it, because it’s so ridiculous. But is this the savvy-veteran-pitchability phase of Alcantara’s career? This guy who can still sit 97 and reach back for velocities that round up to 100 when he needs to — does that count as a junkballer in this age of amped-up velocity? Life comes at you fast, I guess. Everything comes at you fast.