Sort entry titles alphabetically excluding 'The'?
According to SUBSTRING, the first character starts at 1.  So if you wanted to start at the position immediate after The (with one space), you'd need to start at position 5.

Just did a test locally and it works as expected for me if I use:

.order('(CASE WHEN title LIKE "The %" THEN SUBSTRING(title, 5) ELSE title END ) asc')