Tag Archives: Mike Mikolas

Easter Opening Weekend; or, Who Else is Risen?

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Jeff McNeil, Rhys Hoskins

The Mets can’t afford to let Rhys Hoskins remain living free in their heads.

You’d have to be superhuman, five-headed, and swift with all five heads to catch every game on Opening Weekend. But I caught what I could with what I had:

Wait Till Next Year Dept.—Of course you could hear Met fans purring that lament, after the Mets incurred a weekend sweep at the hands of GM David Stearns’ former but still built-by-him Brewers. These are still the fans who know the season’s lost over one bad inning . . . on Opening Day.

Not Terribly Bright Section: Mets second baseman Jeff McNeil fuming over newly-minted Brewer Rhys Hoskins sliding hard and late in the first game. We get McNeil’s fury, especially being spiked on the play, even if baseball government ruled the slide legal. But Hoskins is a known Met antagonist. The Mets will have enough issues going forth without letting him live rent free in their heads.

Dishonourable mention to Mets reliever Yohan Ramirez for winging one behind Hoskins on the first pitch the day after. Sure we’ll believe you weren’t trying to drop him. News flash: You want plausible deniability, wait another pitch or two before sending the message.

By the way, the geniuses who cobbled baseball’s schedule together this year sure picked a pair of bookends—the Mets and the Brewers won’t meet again until the final series of the regular season. It’s plausible that each might be playing for a postseason berth. The Mets better make damn sure Hoskins’s free lease in their heads is expired by then.

Is This Year Next Year Dept.—It’s not that Yankee fans are suddenly going to drop their sense of entitlement or shelve the “What Would George Do?” demands at the first sign of trouble. But a season-opening sweep of the BBA (Big Bad Astros) just had to make Yankee fans feel as though they were getting a special Easter present this time around.

It had to feel even better when the Yankees’ newest import, Juan Soto, factored large enough in the weekend doings. He threw the tying run out at the plate on Thursday night, then he poked what proved the winning run home Sunday in the top of the ninth. And when he couldn’t or didn’t do it, someone like Oswaldo Cabrera could and did: his 4-for-5 with three steaks Friday helped the Yankees to a 7-1 ambush over the AL West ogres.

Resurrection Section: Easter Sunday’s win was the first of the four-sweep in which the Yankees didn’t have to come from behind. By the way, on Saturday, Soto was one of three Yankees to dial the Delta Quadrant—Cabrera hit a two-run homer to tie in the seventh; Soto went solo with two out in the inning to break the tie; and, Anthony Volpe went solo for an insurance run in the eighth.

What’s Uproar, Doc Dept.—Bottom of the seventh in Tropicana Field. Blue Jays vs. Rays. Randy Arozarena on third after a leadoff single, a theft of second, then a theft of third on a swinging strikeout. José Caballero at the plate for the Rays, bunting for a base hit and getting it, scoring Arozarena and taking second when Jays third baseman Justin Turner overthrew first base.

Caballero gunned for third when he realised the throw went into the right field bullpen in foul territory. Jays right fielder George Springer grabbed the ball and threw to shortstop Bo Bichette covering third, with reliever Genesis Cabrera backing the base, getting Caballero out by a few steps. Uh-oh—Caballero bumped into Cabrera on the play, they swapped words . . . and Cabrera gave Caballero a big enough shove to empty the benches and the bullpens.

Bichette pulled Caballero away and two Jays starting pitchers, José Berrios and Alek Manoah, got Cabrera away. That cooled the scrum off practically as fast as it began. The Rays finished what they started, a 5-1 win en route a season-opening series split with the Jays, and Cabrera landed a three-game suspension Sunday, which he’s appealing.

And what were the words that triggered the scrum? According to several sources, Cabrera told reporters Caballero said, simply, “What’s up?” Seriously?

No Betts Are Off Dept.—You weren’t seeing things when you awoke Monday morning to read the season statistics thus far: Mookie Betts has been a threshing machine for the Dodgers out of the gate. In their first six games, the Mookie Monster has four home runs, ten steaks, a .621 on-base percentage, and a 1.136 slugging percentage. (1.757 OPS.) And, the Dodgers followed a season-opening split with the Padres by taking three of four from the Cardinals.

The hard part for the Cardinals: playing Sunday with a short bullpen thanks to their lone win, a Saturday night come-from-behind special. Overall, they’re also missing some key arms thanks to injuries to starter Sonny Gray (hamstring) and reliever Keynan Middleton (forearm).

Bounced Check Dept.: Miles Mikolas, Cardinals righthander, on 16 March: “We’re not exactly a low payroll team, but you got the Dodgers playing checkbook baseball. We’re going to be the hardest working group of Midwestern farmers we can be . . . It would be great to stick it to the Dodgers.”

Miles Mikolas, starting for the Cardinals to open the series against the Dodgers: Four and a third innings pitched in which he was hammered for seven hits and five earned runs including a pair of home runs by Betts and Freddie Freeman, opening his season with a 10.38 ERA.

The farmers barely brought their pitchforks and plows to bear. The Dodgers went on to win that opener, 7-1, and the Cardinals went on to being out-scored 23-14 for the set.

Hold Those Tigers Dept.—Don’t look now, but the Tigers—they who went 78-84 to finish second in the anemic AL Central last year—have opened their season atop the division. They swept the White Sox in three, though not overwhelmingly: they outscored the White Sox by a mere three. But it’s still a promising beginning.

From there the Tigers are scheduled for three against the Mets in New York, the Mets wanting nothing more than to put that season-opening 0-3 behind them if they can. The Tigers, of course, would love to make it difficult for them to do so.

Keept Your Witts About You Dept.—Royals shortstop Bobby Witt, Jr., when Opening Weekend ended: a major league-leading 1.888 OPS. The Royals, after Opening Weekend ended: 1-2, fourth in the AL Central. To survive this season, the Royals will need to keep more than their Witts about them. And, a lot more than Brady Singer on the mound for them.

How to avenge an unwarranted plunk

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Willson Contreras, Ian Happ

Contreras and Happ embracing, after Happ’s backswing caught Contreras on the coconut, quite accidentally—which didn’t stop Cardinals starter Mike Mikolas from buzzing, then drilling Happ in wrongful retaliation Thursday.

Memo to: St. Louis Cardinals. Subject: The Backswing Bop.

Dear Cardinals: We don’t care how long, how deep, and how bristling is your ages-old rivalry with the Cubs. Nobody checks in at the plate looking to conk a catcher on the coconut with a backswing, no matter what kind of swing he has, long, short, whatever. And, no matter that the catcher is set up so far inside for an inside pitch that he might have been lucky if his head didn’t meet the batter’s lumber.

P.S. When your conked catcher and the batter in question—who happen to be former Cub teammates— hug on the catcher’s way off the field, right then and there you should take it to mean peace, and let’s play ball.

You do not want your starting pitcher taking the perverted law into his own hands going back to work by buzzing that batter upstairs before planting one squarely on his backside. Not if you want to keep your pitcher in there instead of seeing him thrown out of the game, turning things over to an unprepared bullpen that’s liable to get pried, pricked, pounded, and poked for ten runs over the eight and a third innings to come.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened after Cardinals starter Miles Mikolas threw one up and in to Cubs left fielder Ian Happ, in the top of the first, making the count 3-1, before drilling Happ squarely in the top of his right rump roast on the next pitch. There were actually two things wrong with that drill.

Thing one: Mikoas was dead wrong to even think about sending “messages” to Happ and the Cubs at all. Happ wasn’t even close to trying with malice aforethought to catch Willson Contreras on the cranium with his backswing. Their hug as a cut and bleeding Contreras left the game told each other, I didn’t mean to hit you, dude. I know, dude. We’re good.

Thing two: Doing it with two out and resurgent Cody Bellinger on deck was an invitation to potential trouble of the kind having nothing to with machismo retaliation and everything to do with the scoreboard kind. The only kind the Cubs were willing to pursue.

It was also liable to produce exactly what it did produce immediately, Mikolas getting tossed from the game. To the none-too-subtle outrage of the Cardinals’ broadcast team who seem to believe accidents deserve assassination attempts in reply. Come on! You gotta be kidding me! You have got to be kidding me! Have a little feel for baseball. Have a little feel for the game. That’s awful.

What’s awful is a pitcher not seeing his catcher’s injury was unintentional and throwing twice straight at the batter, the second one hitting him. No “feel for the game” justifies throwing at a batter over a pure accident. What did Mikolas expect for playing that kind of enforcer? The Medal of Honour?

“[The umpires] had a meeting and decided to toss me,” a seemingly unrepentant Mikolas said postgame. “The umpires can believe what they want to believe. That was their choice. They believed there was intent there and that’s all umpires need.”

One pitch a little too far up and in, followed by the next pitch bounding off Happ’s posterior, was rather convincing evidence. So, exit Mikolas (and Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol); enter Dakota Hudson, who wasn’t going to get a lot of time to heat up because Mikolas didn’t leave the game on account of being injured.

Hudson promptly surrendered a base hit to Bellinger and walked Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki on five pitches before walking shortstop Dansby Swanson with the bases loaded and surrendering a ground-rule, two-run double to designated hitter Christopher Morel, before Cubs catcher Yan Gomes grounded out for the side.

The Cubs extorted three more runs out of Hudson before his day’s work was done, on a pair of third-inning RBI singles and a run-scoring fourth-inning forceout. Hudson’s relief, Andrew Suarez, was greeted rudely when Cubs center fielder Mike Tauchman planted a 2-2 fastball over the center field fence opening the top of the sixth, before a pair of one-out walks in the top of the seventh paved the way for Gomes to slash a two-run double.

During all that, the Cardinals had nothing much to say other than Contreras’s successor, Andrew Knizner, hitting Cubs starter Justin Steele’s first offering of the bottom of the fourth into the left field seats. Not until Knizner batted in the eighth with one out and Cardinals first base insertion Alec Burleson on second (leadoff double) and hit another one into those seats.

It made Knizner the first catcher to enter a game off the bench instead of in the starting lineup and hit a pair over the fences since . . . Cubs manager David Ross, as a Brave on 14 June 2009. “You don’t have much time get ready,” Knizner said postgame. “You just trust your instincts.”

The Cubs said, well, we’ll just see about that in the top of the ninth. Especially after late catching insertion Miguel Amayo was hit by a pitch before being forced at second to set up first and third, from which point Tauchman beat an infield hit out enabling Morel to score the tenth Cub run.

The 10-3 score held up, bringing the Cubs back to .500. They’d sent their own message back to the Cardinals. You want to drill one of ours because of an accidental shot in the head, we’re going to drill you the right way—with hits and runs.

Not even Mikolas (and, apparently, possibly-departing Cardinals pitcher Jack Flaherty) appearing to invite them to come out of their dugout for, ahem, a little chat, could sway them into anything but answering on the field, at the plate, on the mound.

Contreras’s wound was closed with special glue. “I feel good and I want to make sure I’m ready to go tomorrow,” he told reporters. “I wanted to stay in. It was bleeding really bad. It was bad for me because I wanted to stay in there.” Officially, he’s listed day-to-day at this writing.

Having now won eight of their last nine games, the suddenly-hot Cubs have not been without their problems thus far this season. Going back to nursery school with a willfully juvenile opposing pitcher wasn’t one of them.