What does Mikolas have to do to stick with Cardinals’ rotation? Avoid the strike zone

The upside for Miles Mikolas when looking at his 2024 season: his walk rate of 3.5 percent was in the 98th percentile among all qualified pitchers in Major League Baseball.

The downside of the same: pretty much every other number on the ledger.

That leaves the veteran St. Louis Cardinals starter in a difficult spot heading into the final year of his contract, faced with a team in flux and a rotation spot that is firmly his to start the season, but which is not guaranteed to remain in his grip as the year wears on.

Mikolas, who holds a no-trade clause, was among the veterans who declined to pursue a move out of town this winter when the resetting Cardinals canvassed their highly paid players. His salary in conjunction with his performance may well have been enough to prevent any move regardless, but it’s clear that he’s going to have to make adjustments to keep hold of his incumbency.

“Just kind of sticking to things that I’ve been working on a little bit, regardless of the hitter,” Mikolas said Sunday after his first outing of spring, in which he recorded two shutout innings against a very lightly populated Houston Astros lineup. “I threw some changeups that didn’t get any swings, but I liked them. I like where that pitch is. I felt good. Ball’s coming out good, delivery felt pretty smooth.”

It’s typical for veteran starters to be relatively cavalier about their earliest spring outings, but the focus on the changeup is a window into Mikolas’s broader concern. The unusually low walk rate is beneficial in keeping hitters off base for free, but it runs the risk of putting them on base with damage.

Mikolas, unlike so many other pitchers, has the complicated problem of being in the strike zone far too often. It’s difficult to generate chase – only a 27.9% rate last year – when every pitch thrown tends to be magnetized toward the middle of the strike zone.

“If I go just to throw a fastball as hard as I can, it’s, like, right down the middle,” Mikolas explained. “Some guys let it go and it’s up above the zone. Mine happens to, you know, I can close my eyes and throw it as hard as I want, it’s down the middle. Not a good place for it.”

The tendency is so pronounced that Mikolas considered naming his new fishing boat “Too Many Strikes.” He settled on “The Innings Eater,” which is somewhat more aspirational.

Of course, the strike frequency has its undeniable upsides. “Got him a boat,” Cardinals manager Oli Marmol wryly pointed out when asked about Mikolas’s new maritime tools.

“Hopefully this [is] not too difficult,” Marmol said of the team’s request to Mikolas to get the ball out of the zone more often. “We’re asking you to throw it out of the zone. It’s harder when the guy’s out of the zone. You’re asking him to acquire a skill set to throw it in the zone. Hopefully he’s really good at throwing it in the zone. That means he’s accurate.”

The changeup is one way Mikolas is seeking to solve the mystery and diversify his arsenal. He threw just 230 of them last season, accounting for only 8.5% of his deliveries. The heat map hosted by MLB’s Baseball Savant makes the problem with the pitch clear – it’s comprised of a deep read splotch clear in the middle of the zone, precisely the spot where a pitcher would prefer not to miss at lower velocity.

“The way the league values things and the way hitters approach the game changes over time,” Mikolas mused. “Back in ‘18 and ‘19, a lot of guys were still looking for their pitch or trying to put the ball in play a little more. So, you know, 2-1, 2-2 pitches in the zone maybe played a little bit better. But now there’s this, the stats and the way they measure things are different.

“A lot of guys, especially young guys, they’re still trying to get off what is like an ‘A’ swing with two strikes. There’s not a lot of choke and poke.”

That method of hitting played more to Mikolas’s strengths, living on the edges of the zone – but still very much in the zone – and inducing hitters to take underpowered cuts at pitches that resulted in soft contact.

Hitters who are willing to take those pitches, and thus trade striking out looking for occasions where they can generate power, are more likely to do damage against Mikolas and therefore force him out of his comfort zone, the strike zone.

“It’s bullheadedness on this on my part,” Mikolas conceded. “I have to not fall into my old habits of, oh, I’m gonna be sneaky and catch this guy looking. They’re swinging. It’s not like I’m gonna be sneaky with it there.”

It’s a lesson that’s necessary to learn if Mikolas doesn’t intend to spend much more time with his new boat than he may have intended.