'Heartbreak 101': Mikolas, Cards riding emotional roller coaster

ST. PETERSBURG -- Miles Mikolas said he often catches himself staring off into space these days, wondering how things went wrong this season for the reeling Cardinals.

Nights like Tuesday against the Rays -- when Mikolas pitched nearly perfectly for seven innings before he saw everything go off the rails again -- aren’t exactly stopping those painful thoughts from racing through his head at the oddest moments.

Mikolas threw 6 1/3 innings of scoreless baseball before allowing a solo home run to Isaac Paredes on a spinning slider that he wanted back not long after it left his hand. Still, he rallied to close out the seventh inning and took a 1-1 game into the eighth. It was eerily similar to Mikolas' performance at Tropicana Field on June 9, 2022, when he lost, 2-1, to Rays ace Shane McClanahan despite allowing just three hits.

On Tuesday, Mikolas saw a slicing liner hit by Josh Lowe to open the eighth inning narrowly miss Dylan Carlson’s glove in left-center field for a triple. Four singles later -- on three ground balls and one line drive off reliever Andre Pallante -- and the Cardinals were on their way to another frustrating loss, 4-2 to the Rays.

“You’re at the top of the mountain and then the bottom of the valley, and it’s Heartbreak 101,” Mikolas said of the range of emotions he felt after limiting the Rays to eight hits and two runs over seven-plus innings. “You see [ground balls] and you think you’ve got it, and then you don’t. A fly ball goes up and it ends up in that Bermuda Triangle. This game will make you super happy and disappoint you on a regular basis.”

Two days after losing 1-0 to the Rockies, the Cardinals mustered just two runs, on homers from Nolan Arenado off Zach Eflin in the second and Willson Contreras off Pete Fairbanks in the ninth. Arenado flied out to the wall twice. Lefty slugger Nolan Gorman also hit a deep fly to right-center in the eighth, but center fielder Jose Siri made a leaping catch to end the inning and keep the game tied at 1.

Minutes later, Lowe’s tailing liner was nearly tracked down by Carlson, but it got down for a triple that started the unraveling.

“That was a big part of the game both ways,” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said. “Gorman just missed his [for a home run].”

Because of a variety of issues -- primarily his inactivity while on Team USA's roster for the World Baseball Classic, when he pitched only sporadically -- Mikolas’ season started slowly and led to him experiencing a wide range of emotions. After signing a two-year, $40 million extension at the end of Spring Training and being named the Opening Day starter when Adam Wainwright went down with a groin strain, Mikolas was just 1-1 with a 5.40 ERA through eight starts.

After going 3-0 with a sparkling 1.89 ERA in May, Mikolas endured one of his roughest stretches as a Cardinal by going 0-4 with a 6.07 ERA in June. That’s about the time St. Louis slipped far enough out of the playoff race to begin focusing more on 2024 than on trying to make a late-season push.

In some ways, Mikolas said, the mustachioed man staring back at him in the mirror is to blame for the team’s many struggles. If the Cardinals don’t rally down the stretch, their 15-year run of finishing with a winning record will come to an end.

“Sometimes, you sit around and late at night you look in the mirror and wonder, ‘Is this what I really look like? Is this really what happened?’ Sometimes, you look inward and you look up at the [score] board, and those aren’t numbers that I like,” said Mikolas, whose 4.20 ERA is above his career 3.78 mark. “There’s some season [left] to make the numbers look good on the surface, but when you get off to a slow start …

“Guys like [Paul Goldschmidt] and myself -- older guys who are team leaders -- I feel like part of this is my fault,” Mikolas continued. “I didn’t pitch to my abilities early in the season. Bad breaks? Maybe. But did I pitch as well as I could have? I didn’t have a good early part of the season, and you’re counting on a guy to anchor the rotation. I’m eating up innings, but not always in a great way. There’s some season left and we’re still in it mathematically, so I hear. But we’ve got to give it everything we’ve got the rest of the season.”