A Sandy Alcantara trade is EXACTLY what the Twins need

Even the most optimistic fan of the Minnesota Twins has to concede one point about this roster: it doesn't have a sure-fire ace.

Pablo Lopez is the closest thing they have, and is a top-20 or so pitcher in the game today. If you want to call that an ace, it's fine by me. I would probably agree.

But if an even better pitcher became available, it would be foolish for the Twins not to inquire, right?

Enter Sandy Alcantara, the ace of the Miami Marlins. Alcantara, the National League Cy Young Award winner in 2022, is coming off missing the entire 2024 season due to Tommy John surgery.

And according to MLB Network's Jon Morosi, he could become available around the trade deadline — if not sooner.

If winning the Cy Young isn't enough for you, dear reader, consider that Alcantara was a 5.9 fWAR/8.0 bWAR pitcher that season. By comparison, Lopez has never registered above 4.6 fWAR/3.3 bWAR.

When both are healthy, it's not even a comparison — and that's by no means a slight to Lopez, who has been everything the Twins expected and more through two seasons with the club.

So why not go back to the well with another Marlins pitcher?

This wouldn't be an exact case of returning to the bargaining table. Kim Ng was the general manager when the Marlins traded Lopez and a couple of prospects for Luis Arraez back in 2023. Now, Peter Bendix is at the helm.

But not much has changed in Marlins land. The team is still not particularly good, and won't be for awhile. They've already moved on from Arraez, who took a step back in 2024 despite winning the batting title with a .314 average between Miami and San Diego. He's a free agent to-be this offseason.

And in the Arraez trade, the Marlins did what they continue to do over and over — churn big-league caliber players who are getting expensive for young talent. In this case, Dillon Head, Woo-Suk Go, Jakob Marsee and Nathan Martorella from the Padres.

The Marlins have had mixed success with deals like this. The Christian Yelich deal was a disaster. The Marcell Ozuna deal was incredible, generally speaking; the team netted Magneuris Sierra, Daniel Castano, Zac Gallen and, believe it or not, Alcantara.

Gallen was later flipped to Arizona for Jazz Chisholm Jr. — after the Twins inquired and were told he would not be moved by the Marlins — and the infielder was then traded to the Yankees.

And the return for Chisolm? You guessed it, three prospects.

As a brief aside, Gallen would be another good trade target for the Twins. But he's headed to free agency this offseason. The Diamondbacks aren't as inept as the Marlins.

Where Alcantara differentiates himself is that, despite coming off Tommy John surgery — the next season is notoriously a mixed bag for those pitchers (see Francisco Liriano in 2008) — he is still under club control for multiple seasons at an incredibly reasonable rate.

It's not entirely analogous to the Lopez trade, but the Twins handed him a massive — at least for them — contract extension not long after the trade.

Alcantara is signed for the next two seasons at $17.3 million apiece, and has a $21 million team option with a $2 million buyout in 2027 — his age-31 season.

Whoever has Alcantara over the next three seasons will have an ace-level starter for under $60 million through his ages 29-31 seasons, to restate it slightly more clearly.

Outside of rookie contracts and some of the abominations handed out by the Atlanta Braves, this is one of the team-friendly deals a player has in the entire game.

And if you think that isn't music to Derek Falvey's ears, you haven't been paying attention.

The Twins love to be opportunistic in these spots, just like they were with Lopez. If they'd have waited at all, they likely would have paid more than double what they did — four years, $73 million tacked onto his existing deal that paid him $5.45 million in 2023 — or likely lost him to free agency after last season.

Even with teams not necessarily shelling out the big bucks on starting pitchers as they used to — with Gerrit Cole an obvious recent exception — Lopez would likely have been looking at six years and $150 million or so.

So we've established that Alcantara would be a very good fit from a salary standpoint. As long as the Pohlads own the Twins — hopefully about another half hour or so — that's going to be part of the calculus.

It might be anyway; Falvey seems to enjoy having the flexibility to make moves at all times. It also helps that he's gotten two superstars in Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa on below-market deals for their skill levels (also Lopez, one might say).

But where the rubber meets the road is acquisition cost. The Marlins will expect a lot, and rightly so.

Here's how I would expect that to look:

• The Marlins ask for a package headlined by Walker Jenkins
• The Twins grimace and counter with Emmanuel Rodriguez, who would thrive as a Latin player in Miami
• The Marlins ask for a high-end (but still cheap) pitcher, and settle on one of David Festa, Zebby Matthews or Simeon Woods Richardson
• The Twins agree
• The Marlins ask for a big-league hitter who is pre-arbitration
• The Twins offer one of Brooks Lee, Edouard Julien or Jose Miranda — players with differing values, which would affect which pitching prospect above would be traded (I would value them in the order listed, personally)
• The Marlins say "not so fast, we also want a lottery ticket prospect" and ask for Brandon Winokur
• That's too rich for the Twins, but the deal is close, and they agree to move one of Billy Amick, Rayne Doncon or Gabriel Gonzalez

The final deal looks something like this:

• From Miami: starting pitcher Sandy Alcantara
• From Minnesota: outfielder Emmanuel Rodriguez, Zebby Matthews, Jose Miranda and Gabriel Gonzalez

I can hear you as a Twins fan, even if you aren't one of the prospect-hugging type.

"Wow, that seems like a lot!"

That's because it is. And because it has to be.

Pitchers like Alcantara aren't available often, and they're almost never on a deal like his is. The Twins could wait into the season to see how he responds in his first year back, but a player under control for three years has enough runway that the team can absorb however that first year goes (most likely better at the end than the beginning, for what it's worth).

The Twins trade Rodriguez because he's easier to part with than Jenkins. Rodriguez is an incredible prospect and should be a good major leaguer; Jenkins reminds some of Larry Walker.

It might make center field a bit more murky, but Byron Buxton still handles it fairly well when he's available, and there are other options out there besides.

The Twins are OK moving a young big-league infielder in this instance because they are flush with depth there, and have Luke Keaschall waiting in the wings as well. But they could make moving any of that trio workable by plugging in a 2B-3B combo of Lee-Miranda if Julien is the move, Julien-Lee if Miranda is the move or Julien-Miranda if Lee is the move (which I'd consider least likely).

To lose a pitching prospect in that vein is not ideal, but this front office has shown the willingness to move pitching prospects of all types (Chase Petty, Sawyer Gipson-Long and Cade Povich, to name a few). They've been pretty good at finding these types of guys, and should lean on that again in the future to replenish the system after this move.

As for the lottery ticket, many teams like this as a sweetener to a deal. For the Twins, it was Byron Chourio in the Lopez deal. Chourio does not appear on the team's top-30 prospect list just released by MLB Pipeline in the last few days.

Neither does Jose Salas, for that matter.

But that shows how hard those deals are to gauge. The Twins got two prospects who fell off the map, and still won the trade handily. Many times, a big leaguer is traded for four hotshot prospects and none of them ever really make it. The Miguel Cabrera deal comes to mind — and guess who he played for when he was traded? — as does the Yelich deal.

You may see a pattern here.

The Twins are flush with players who have debuted but not necessarily found their way in the big leagues yet — and cashing them in with a big-time outfield prospect (an injury-prone one, at that) and a pitching prospect makes a lot of sense, especially when it nets them one of the few things they don't already have.

The Twins don't have a Sandy Alcantara.

But the team who does is not equipped to use him properly.

You know what that means.

Nice trade, Falvey.