SEATTLE -- When the Cardinals gathered for their usual hitters’ meeting prior to Saturday night’s game at T-Mobile Park, the topic of discussion quickly strayed from bland and technical hitting approaches to something more heart-to-heart, stuff full of fire and passion, according to rookie Alec Burleson.
Nolan Arenado took the lead in the meeting, as he often does, and told teammates to go to the plate against Mariners ace Luis Castillo with the mindset of trying to “single him to death.” As it turns out, the Cardinals did just that by getting to the owner of MLB’s second-best ERA coming into Saturday with three early runs and seven hits to drive Castillo from the game.
From there, it was up to the Cardinals’ pitching staff -- ace Miles Mikolas and a couple of their hottest relievers to try to end one of the club's ugliest stretches of baseball in years. Sadly for the Cards, the result was one that has been all too familiar in an early-season slog that’s been filled with frustrating finishes because of plenty of pitching problems.
Burned all season by long balls and two-strike damage thus far, Mikolas surrendered a full-count, two-run home run to Teoscar Hernández in the sixth inning on his final pitch of the game. From there, previously flawless reliever Zack Thompson was touched for two runs -- his first earned runs allowed on the season -- and the Cardinals saw their early offense devolve into a 5-4 loss to the Mariners.
“It’s all the more frustrating to see us come up big, score some runs and chase [Castillo] from the game and then have my decent outing blown on one pitch there at the end,” said Mikolas, an All-Star in 2022 whose ERA sits at a bloated 7.46 in late April.
The loss dropped the Cardinals (8-13) to five games below .500 for the first time since they entered play on June 29, 2017, with a 36-41 record. Even before Saturday, the Cardinals came in having lost 12 of their first 20 games for the first time since 1997. Like this Cardinals squad, the 1997 Cardinals came in as defending NL Central champions, but struggled badly out of the gate. The 1997 Cards lost 89 times, but manager Oliver Marmol is convinced that this star-studded squad is close to turning around its season.
“It’s easy to think [negatively] and cave, and this group is not going to do that,” Marmol said. “We like the odds against us, and we’ll continue to get after it. We had a good meeting with those guys today and the reality is, it’s not great. The month hasn’t been great, and we like the challenge.”
The Cardinals opened the game with singles from Lars Nootbaar and Burleson and scored off Castillo after just four batters. Coming into the night, Seattle’s ace had surrendered just two runs all season and had taken a perfect game into the seventh inning in his previous outing. Burleson, who had two hits and was on base three times on the night, had a feeling the Cardinals' offense was up to the challenge of facing Castillo, who surrendered two more runs in the third and was done by the fifth after the Cards drove up his pitch count.
“[Arenado] said it best in the hitters' meeting -- we just want to single [Castillo] to death because just scoring runs and even singling him to death is hard,” said Burleson, who scored from first base on a double by Willson Contreras in the third inning. “That’s what we did early. A lot of good things from our offense today. We knew what [Castillo] had and we executed our plan.”
Mikolas was two outs away from registering only the third Cardinals quality start of the season when his 3-2 pitch to Hernández -- the hero of Seattle’s win on Friday -- got too much of the plate.
Thompson, the Cards' best lefty all season, got out of the sixth, but his four-pitch walk to the .094-hitting Kolten Wong was a bad omen to lead off the seventh. Giovanny Gallegos, who came on for Thompson, seemed poised to get out of the inning, but Eugenio Suárez singled in the winning runs when the right-hander missed on a fastball that was supposed to be up and in.
“Sometimes, maybe it’s good to get the [bad] luck out of the way early,” Mikolas contemplated. “Since I’ve been here, we’ve been a second-half team. Last year, even at the All-Star break, we weren’t in first place, but we kept playing the same brand of baseball and we won the division. Hopefully it’s not too late, and I don’t think it is because it’s still early in the season.”