Sandy Alcantara is an old-school starting pitcher

Sandy Alcantara leads all Major League starting pitchers in WAR, and as I wrote before could very well be on his way to becoming the best starting pitcher in the game. I was recently reached out to by the site that published this article about Alcantara. They told me what manager Don Mattingly said about him and it inspired this article.

Sandy Alcantara is an old-school starting pitcher.

There used to be a time when starting pitcher weren’t simply “starting”, they did everything, they finished the entire game. Sandy Alcantara is that type of pitcher. In the past it was common for starting pitchers such as Walter Johnson and Sandy Koufax to throw 300+ innings a year. Now, it’s not even as common to see 200+ innings a year.

Sandy Alcantara shares far more than his first name with the aforementioned Koufax, like him he’s an inning eating workhorse. He’s also arguably the best starting pitcher in the game, kind of how Koufax used to be back in his prime.

Let’s take a look at what Don Mattingly recently said about Sandy Alcantara:

“A lot of guys say, hey, I want to be great and I want to be a great pitcher — I want to be this or that. And then they don’t quite back that up with the work that they do and the focus that they put in. Sandy has backed up everything he said he wanted to be and just continues to go on that path.”

Mattingly also said:

“His thought process is different than today’s game. I remember when he first started, our analytics guys were like, oh, they don’t want him to throw his changeup. They want him to strike out more people and all this stuff, And Sandy was like ‘I don’t care about strikeouts. I want to pitch deep into games.’ There’s days when he needs a strikeout, he can. But in general, I think he’s just as happy to put the ball on the ground, get an out quick, move on and be able to stay out there. And that’s a different mentality than we kind of teach in the game today.”

Those quotes say it all. Sandy Alcantara is an old-school workhorse for the Miami Marlins. He’s dedicated to his craft and is everything thst we could ever possibly have wanted in an ace.