I can’t tell you how many times I said it last year, offered an excuse, but one that had some teeth: “don’t worry about Kevin Alcántara’s slow start, as this is his first month in a cold-weather assignment, he’ll be fine.” Sure enough, Alcántara turned it on after April, and raked his way to Double-A by the end of the year.
That’s where Alcántara starts his 2024 season, back at Double-A Tennessee, and once again he is having a terrible start to the season: through his first 29 plate appearances, Alcántara has zero hits, three walks, and eleven strikeouts. Of the balls he has put into play, 80% have been on the ground. Yikes. Across the board, yikes.
Now, then, I don’t want anyone to confuse this for concern, because I don’t have any. Yet. Any player can have a bad week, and that’s effectively what we’re looking at here: one bad week of baseball at a mostly-new level. Even at the month mark, as we saw last year, I wouldn’t necessarily be freaking out, so there’s a long time to go before we get to the worry portion of the festivities.
That said, this time around, we can’t really make the cold-weather excuse, because Alcántara has had that experience now, and also that’s not really what this particular weather stretch has been like anyway. Dealing with rough early-season weather is something he, like all Cubs prospects, is going to have to sort out eventually. Wrigley Field in April and May can be brutal.
Because the early results had been so brutally bad, I thought this worth noting for further observation. I think the offensive upside there is so considerable that Alcántara could explode at any moment and then I’ll have another year of saying things like, “Yes, but if you chop off the first two weeks of the season, he’s got a 150 wRC+ on the year!” We also have to keep a couple core things in mind: he is still a 21-year-old at Double-A, which is impressive, and he’s a plus defensive center fielder.
One other thing to note: in 2022, at Myrtle Beach, Alcántara had a really slow start, too (.213/.296/.298/65 wRC+, 35.2% K over his first two weeks), so maybe he’s just a slow starter right now.