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.

I expect Sandy Alcántara will be traded in July.

My friend Harold Reynolds says the deal will happen *before Opening Day*.

Loved the discussion this morning on @MLBNetwork. https://t.co/5qUKtTUTBO

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) March 6, 2025
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.