For a fourth consecutive year, Sandy Alcantara is Miami Marlins’ Opening Day starter

The inevitable is now official.

Sandy Alcantara, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, will be the Miami Marlins’ Opening Day starting pitcher when they host the New York Mets on March 30 at loanDepot park to begin the 2023 season.

Alcantara will be the first pitcher in franchise history to start four consecutive Opening Days. Josh Becket (2003-2005) and Josh Johnson (2010-2012) each had three consecutive Opening Day starts. No other Marlins pitcher has had more than two.

The decision should come as little surprise considering Alcantara’s status on the club. He is the ace of the rotation and showed last season he is one of MLB’s best.

He was the first Marlins player to win a Cy Young Award and the first NL pitcher to win the award in unanimous fashion since the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw in 2014.

He led MLB in innings pitched (228 2/3) and complete games (six). He worked at least eight innings in 14 of his starts — the most by any MLB pitcher since 2014. Alcantara’s 2.28 ERA was the second-lowest in Marlins’ history (behind Kevin Brown’s 1.89 in 1996) and in the National League in 2022 (behind Julio Urias’ 2.16). He held opponents to two earned runs or fewer in 25 of his 32 starts.

Alcantara is also the first pitcher in Marlins franchise history to have multiple 200-inning, 200-strikeout seasons and the first in MLB to hit those marks in consecutive seasons since Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom all did so in 2018 and 2019.

One of his complete games last season — and perhaps one of his most memorable moments in 2022 — came on the road against the St. Louis Cardinals, with whom current Marlins manager Skip Schumaker was the bench coach.

“I’ve seen him plenty on the other side, so I know what he’s capable of,” Schumaker said Friday. “He threw a complete game against us last year, so I was very aware of what he can do on the mound.”

Now that he has seen Alcantara up close and personal for more than a month during spring training, what has impressed Schumaker the most about his ace?

“The in-between stuff,” Schumaker said. “The work ethic, the weight room, the leadership with the other players. I’ve heard he was the quiet leader, and that part’s true, but he’s also taken another step, I think, in his career leadership-wise. The guys are around him all the time — young guys and older guys — talking through baseball life, the whole deal. If you can’t find him, he’s in the weight room. I think that part’s impressed me, but it’s also not surprising because of the guys I’ve played with or been around that have won Cy Youngs or MVPs look like that. There’s really no magic pill to this thing. That’s kind of what it looks like and there’s a reason why he is who he is.”

The Marlins are 1-2 in Alcantara’s three Opening Day starts, beating the Philadelphia Phillies 5-2 on the road in 2020 and losing 1-0 to the Tampa Bay Rays at home in 2021 and 6-5 in extra innings on the road to the San Francisco Giants in 2022.

Alcantara’s combined stat line for those three games: five runs allowed (only three earned runs) on seven hits and nine walks with 18 strikeouts over 17 2/3 innings.

For the Mets, it will be Max Scherzer starting on the mound for the season opener. This will be Scherzer’s seventh career Opening Day start and first with the Mets. He started the season opener for the Washington Nationals six times (2015-2016; 2018-2021).