Sandy Alcantara wants to be the Miami Marlins’ ace. And 2020 is his season to prove it
Sandy Alcantara’s stellar run to finish his 2019 season took place at Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park. Six innings pitched. One run allowed. Five strikeouts.
The start to Alcantara’s 2020 season, one in which the 24-year-old right-handed pitcher from the Dominican Republic hopes to show the Miami Marlins that he can take his game to the next level, begins at that same venue.
The Marlins open their 60-game sprint of a season, one shortened by nearly four months and more than 100 games because of the coronavirus pandemic, with a three-game series against the Philadelphia Phillies. First pitch on Friday is set for 7:05 p.m. Alcantara faces off against Aaron Nola.
“We’re going to surprise a lot of people this year,” Alcantara said. “... You’re going to see what we’ve got.”
Alcantara, along with the rest of the Marlins’ starting rotation, will play a pivotal role if they want to make that proclamation reality.
That applies on a team level, as the Marlins will once again rely on starting pitching as their strength even with the addition of players such as Corey Dickerson, Jesus Aguilar and Jonathan Villar to ignite the offense.
It also applies on a personal level. Alcantara will need a big year to fend off the slew of top pitching prospects closing in on their debuts — the same prospects turning to Alcantara for advice even though he is still honing his own craft as he gets ready to start his second full major-league season.
He’s ready for the challenge.
“They want me to be a leader,” Alcantara said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. Keep preparing myself. Keep getting better. Become an ace.”
‘His stuff is as good as anyone’
Marlins manager Don Mattingly’s description of an ace is a simple one.
“The ace needs to be ‘that guy,’” Mattingly said. “When he pitches, your team should feel like you’re going to win.”
With that in mind, it’s easy to see what the Marlins like about Alcantara’s potential and why they gave him the Opening Day nod.
He has five pitches that he can throw for strikes but relies primarily on a fastball, sinker and slider combination. The changeup and curveball are primarily used against left-handed hitters.
Alcantara was one of the best in the league last year in inducing weak contact, which helped offset his below-average strikeout rates.
Oh, and he throws the ball hard, too.
Both his four-seam fastball and sinker averaged above 95 mph last year. The changeup hits in the low 90s. The slider usually clocks around 85 mph and the curveball sits in the low 80s.
“His stuff is as good as anyone,” Mattingly said. “I don’t care who you want to put out there. His stuff is as good as anyone’s.”
Mattingly had no problem putting some big names out there.
Max Scherzer. Stephen Strasburg. Justin Verlander. Clayton Kershaw.
“Those are the kinds of guys that he can become,” Mattingly said.
Eventually.
There’s still another level to Alcantara’s game, one where he better controls his surroundings, perfects his sequences and adapt mentally to the situation at hand.
“The more that he does it,” pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr said, “there’s going to be a much better understanding of who this guy is. ... His stuff, it smells, it spells and it feels front end. He’s learned a lot. He’s come a long ways.”
‘The beautiful game I love’
But to really know Alcantara, you need to go beyond what you see on the mound every fifth day.
He started playing baseball when he was 8 years old. He pitched and played right field as a youngster and idolized Pedro Martinez. He has 10 siblings. At age 11, he moved in with an older sister Aridia in Santo Domingo, three hours away from his hometown of Azua, so that he could both play baseball and attend school. He dropped out of school in eighth grade to focus solely on baseball, “this beautiful game that I love,” as he calls it.
He has a French bulldog named Tady, who Alcantara said is like a little brother to his son, Sadiel. Alcantara’s son feeds and walks Tady.
“He’s a very energetic dog who loves to be running around the house, biting laces off my shoes and causing trouble,” Alcantara said. “Tady brings love and joy to our home but also gives my son responsibility at a young age.
He spends his off days playing on his Playstation 4. Games of choice are PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, MLB The Show and Call of Duty.
South Florida in some ways reminds him of being back in the Dominican Republic.
“The Spanish culture, the weather, living driving distance from the beach,” Alcantara said. “These are all things that make me feel at home.”
He uses his platform as a professional baseball player to give back to that home country. Last year, on his 24th birthday, Alcantara held a charity softball tournament in Hialeah called “Softball with the Sandman.”
The entry fee for each of the 16 teams was $200 plus each player donating at least one piece of baseball-related equipment. Most of the teams gave more.
More than 100 bats and dozens of gloves, helmets and cleats were sprawled underneath a tent near the center of the park, nestled between four of the fields used for the tournament. Alcantara’s camp estimated they had received about $15,000 worth of equipment.
Alcantara donated it all to his former little league – La Liga Luisa Blanca – in Monte Plata after the Marlins’ season ended. The league usually has more than 100 kids each year.
“As a kid,” Alcantara explained, “I’d have to improvise on what I used to play the game. We didn’t have much. It was difficult. Now, I have the platform to help kids in the DR to overcome those same challenges.”
Chasing the dream
Alcantara’s opportunity to start chasing his dream surfaced in July 2013. Alcantara, 17 at the time, signed his first professional contract with the St. Louis Cardinals as an international free agent.
It took him just over four years to make his MLB debut, serving as a September call-up for the St. Louis Cardinals late in the 2017 season.
Johnny Rodriguez, Alcantara’s manager at the Cardinals’ Double A affiliate, broke the news to his pitcher that he was going to the big leagues.
“I had never seen him so excited,” Rodriguez told the St. Louis Dispatch. “He sat down, got up. He almost fell back. If there had been no wall behind him, he might have fallen back.”
Alcantara made eight appearances out of the bullpen, giving up four earned runs over 8 1/3 innings with 10 strikeouts. He got his first taste of the big leagues.
Two months later, he was on his way to the Marlins, part of a four-player package from the Cardinals in a trade for Marcell Ozuna.
The Marlins viewed Alcantara as one of the headline prospects they obtained from the handful of trades that created the franchise’s latest rebuild.
“You see the size. You see the raw ability and the pitch package. You see the potential,” Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill said. “That’s what we identified when we started those [trade] conversations.”
So far, he’s been one of the few success stories as Year 3 gets set to begin.
He opened 2019 as the No. 4 starter and, in spurts, showed the ace qualities the Marlins wanted. An 89-pitch complete game shutout against the New York Mets highlighted those efforts. Some consistency followed with quality starts, defined as giving up no more than three runs while pitching at least six innings, followed in four of his next six outings to help Alcantara secure his first All-Star Game appearance.
But there was still something missing. Every solid outing seemed to be matched by one with tentativeness and passiveness.
“Usually when he struggles,” Mattingly said, “it’s because he’s not on the plate. Simple as that.”
‘Double-play man’ and the All-Star Game
Alcantara’s final pitch of his first MLB All-Star game appearance at Cleveland’s Progressive Park, an 89.1 mph slider to Jose Abreu, was right where he wanted it: low in the strike zone.
With a runner on first base, Abreu bit on the pitch and hit a groundball to shortstop Paul DeJong.
Alcantara, in probably the most fitting way to showcase himself in a national setting, ended the eighth inning by inducing a double play.
“That’s normal for me,” Alcantara said. “I’m a double-play man.”
He’s not kidding. By season’s end, Alcantara forced hitters to ground into 23 double plays, tied with the Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas, Texas Rangers’ Mike Minor and Atlanta Braves’ Mike Soroka for the second-most in MLB.
And Alcantara’s outing came with him not knowing if he would even get into the game.
“I’ll be in the bullpen,” Alcantara said a couple hours before first pitch, “waiting for my opportunity.”
More important than his inning on the mound, though, was the sense of validity that Alcantara was among the National League’s best players. He spent time talking with Kershaw and Scherzer, a pair of three-time Cy Young Award winners. Alcantara asked Kershaw to teach him how he throws his curveball.
He played catch in the outfield with Pittsburgh Pirates closer Felipe Vazquez in right-center field while the NL team took batting practice.
“An unforgettable moment,” Alcantara said.
Building off success
But the All-Star Game was just Alcantara’s coming out moment to Major League Baseball.
He dominated his final 10 starts of the season.
A 2.73 ERA, 58 strikeouts against just 18 walks, seven quality starts, his second complete game of the season.
“Now,” Alcantara said after that final start against Philadelphia, “I can go home happy.”
And start preparing for 2020.
While Alcantara couldn’t have predicted what ultimately unfolded — a three-plus month layoff due to a global pandemic two weeks before the season was due to start — he still put in the necessary work to be prepared for Opening Day.
When Alcantara returned for summer camp, he was already conditioned to throw close to 75 pitches. He said he was ready to start the season after two days of practice.
He had to wait a bit, but the ace-to-be’s next test is here.
“I can’t wait,” Alcantara said, “to get outside on Friday and be on the mound.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 10:13 AM.
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