Pitching is the Marlins’ strength. Is there an eventual Cy Young winner on their staff?

It’s the one major award that has continued to elude the Miami Marlins.

Over the franchise’s 28-year history, the Marlins have never had a player win the Cy Young Award. They’ve come close before, with Dontrelle Willis in 2005 and Kevin Brown in 1996 finishing as runners-up and Jose Fernandez placing third in 2013, but the hardware never made its way to South Florida.

Their chances of having a player contend for the title in 2020’s shortened season became obsolete when their ace was sidelined as part of the early season COVID-19 outbreak and their one pitcher to make every scheduled start had back-to-back rough outings in early September.

The Cincinnati Reds’ Trevor Bauer ultimately edged out the Chicago Cubs’ Yu Darvish and New York Mets’ Jacob deGrom for the NL Cy Young Award this season, as announced Wednesday and voted on by a panel of 30 members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America at the end of the regular season.

But with starting pitching as the backbone of the Marlins’ roster, can Miami have a contender for the Cy Young Award in 2021 as they look to build on last season’s playoff run and try to turn the corner in Year 4 of their rebuild under the Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter ownership group?

And to single out one pitcher: What exactly will Sandy Alcantara have to do in order to find himself as one of the NL’s top three pitchers at the end of 2021?

Alcantara, after all, is still the ace of this rotation, with Pablo Lopez and Elieser Hernandez expected to be the Nos. 2 and 3 after showing significant improvement in 2020. The progression of top prospect Sixto Sanchez makes him a likely candidate to be on the Opening Day roster in 2021, while a group of top prospects headlined by Trevor Rogers, Braxton Garrett, Nick Neidert and Edward Cabrera will head into spring training competing for roster spots.

The biggest area of growth for Alcantara to focus on: consistency.

The 25-year-old right-handed pitcher has dazzled at times over the past two seasons. He threw a pair of complete games during the 2019 season and posted a 2.73 ERA in the final 10 games that year en route to being named the Marlins’ 2020 Opening Day starter when the season finally began in late July. He came up in pivotal moments last season after returning from a bout with COVID-19, including throwing 7 1/3 innings in the Marlins’ win over the Yankees on Sept. 25 to secure their first playoff berth since 2003 and 6 2/3 innings of one-run ball in their first playoff game against the Chicago Cubs.

“When he’s attacking from the zone, his stuff’s unbelievable,” third baseman Brian Anderson said. “... He’s a workhorse, and we’ve got full confidence every time he runs out there that he’s going to give us everything he’s got.”

But nearly every big moment has almost always been matched with struggles.

Over his last 32 regular-season starts (all seven starts in 2020 and his final 25 starts in 2019), Alcantara has a 3.62 ERA, a 1.27 WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) and a 7.2 strikeout-per-nine-inning rate.

To compare that to the last 10 NL Cy Young Award winners before 2020:

▪ Alcantara’s ERA was almost one-and-a-half points higher than average for Cy Young winners (2.25).

▪ His WHIP was 32 points higher than average, with everyone except Roy Halladay in 2010 and R.A. Dickey holding opponents to fewer than one walk and hit per inning.

▪ He allowed more hits per nine inning (7.84) than everyone except Halladay (8.29) and Dickey (8.71) and his strikeout-per-nine-innings rate was well below the competition. Five of the past six winners (deGrom in both 2018 and 2019, Max Scherzer in 2017 and 2016, and Clayton Kershaw in 2014) all averaged between 10.85 and 12.02 strikeouts per nine innings.

But Marlins manager Don Mattingly knows there’s another level to Alcantara’s game. It’s hard not for there to be with his arsenal of pitches — a sinker and a four-seam fastball that both averaged above 96 mph last season, a high-90s slider that resulted in a 35.5 percent swing-and-miss rate, a low-90s change-up that was effective against left-handed hitters and an improving curveball to round out his arsenal.

“If he gets everything going,” Mattingly said, “he’s really a lot to handle.”

Having confidence in himself is key, too. That was a problem early in 2019 even as he went on to be named an All-Star. He started realizing his potential late and began becoming more vocal as 2020 progressed.

The Marlins hope that translates into a more consistent Alcantara in 2021, one who can hopefully become part of the upper echelon of MLB pitchers.

“He wants the ball,” shortstop Miguel Rojas said. “He wants to be the guy. He’s confident, and he’s pretty good. That’s a pretty good combination.”