Former Cardinal Sandy Alcantara’s stats against the St. Louis Cardinals this season, relative to his numbers against the rest of the league, are almost too ridiculous to be real.
Overall, Alcantara has been one of MLB’s worst pitchers in 2025, his first year back from Tommy John surgery.
His ERA across 134.0 innings pitched is 6.04, quite literally the worst ERA among qualified MLB starting pitchers this season, per my research using the FanGraphs statistical leaderboard. But the former Cy Young Award winner just seems to turn back into his prime form when facing the Cardinals.
Go figure.
Alcantara carved up the Cards for seven innings on Wednesday, sparing the Marlins from suffering a sweep in the series as Miami defeated the Cardinals, 6-2. He truly had it in cruise control through four innings against St. Louis, with an unearned run and a Willson Contreras solo homer being all the Cardinals were able to muster thereafter.
It’s the second time in 2025 that the Cardinals have faced the former Redbird, and inexplicably, it’s the second time that the pitcher who has been otherwise pitiful has stymied the St. Louis lineup—and has looked like his old self in the process.
In 12 innings of work across the two matchups against St. Louis, Alcantara has allowed two runs, just one of them earned, for a 0.75 ERA. He’s struck out 13 batters while allowing only 8 hits.
Against the rest of the league this season, Alcantara has produced a 6.49 ERA. To put that into some additional context, for however you felt about Erick Fedde’s performance with the Cardinals this season, he carried a 5.22 ERA during this year’s stint with St. Louis.
For his career, Miles Mikolas owns a 6.5 K/9 ratio—Alcantara’s K/9 ratio this year when he’s not facing the Cardinals? 6.8.
But when facing the Cardinals? Cy Sandy.
Is there any rhyme or reason to explain this?
The sample size is obviously microscopic, given he’s only faced the Cardinals twice this year. Sometimes, especially in the first year back from major arm surgery, pitchers have their good days and their bad days. Maybe the Cardinals simply caught Sandy, unfortunately, on a couple of his rare good days in 2025.
Perhaps there’s more to it than that, though. Could Alcantara be sharper just from seeing the familiar birds on the bat stride into the batter’s box? There shouldn’t really be any ill will for Alcantara toward the Cardinals for trading him in the deal that brought Marcell Ozuna to St. Louis before the 2018 season. After all, the trade opened the door for Alcantara to truly spread his wings with Miami.
But extra motivation to lock in against your former team can’t necessarily be ruled out of this discussion as a plausible explanation for Alcantara’s brilliance against the Cardinals.
Beyond the box score, Alcantara did look like himself on Wednesday night. The home plate umpire caught some griping from Cardinals fans (perhaps rightfully so), but it wasn’t just charity propelling Sandy to a strong outing.
Seeing the velocity and the crisp secondary offerings from Alcantara did make me feel for a moment like I was watching his 2022 Cy Young campaign over again. So, maybe the best for Alcantara’s 2025 is yet to come.
Or maybe the Alcantara conundrum just goes down as another unexplained mild frustration in a 2025 Cardinals season that hardly feels worthy getting worked up about anymore.