Miles Mikolas unveils tech world of sign stealing & pitch tipping

Hey, Miles, Michael List is here car parked. Good to see you, Miles, been a minute.

How's the season?

How's it going. Good to see you guys again.

Yeah, you too. I watched most of your start the other day and this is really how it happened. We're like, I'm texting with the group. You know, we got the whole ft team that keeps growing, and we're like, hey, we haven't had Miles on in a minute's pitching. Well we got to get them on. So how's life right now with the season. I know, obviously it's been kind of a weird year with the Cardinals still transitioning.

But how's it going.

Yeah, you know, I personally myself, I've been on the roller coaster, you know, up and down, two steps forward, one steps back, like good starts, bad starts. But you know, I'm trying to keep it even keel, you know, in the clubhouse for the young guys, you know, trying to send an example, do do whatever I can in that regards.

And it's been a fun and as a team.

I know, like individually, I think I could speak for everybody on the team, like we are having fun. We're we're playing fun, We're playing loose. You know, we'd like to play better. Probably I'd like to pitch better, you know, more often. And you know, everyone always wants to be better, right, Yeah.

For sure.

I mean that's that's the name of the game. You don't sit there and go, man, my mustache looks tremendous. I hope, I just do mid. You want to play, You want to play your best.

Yeah, yeah, you want to show up for the fans and for everybody when you when you go into a visiting city, you want to stick it to them. And you just want to really just you know, be your best and kind of, you know, kind of do that. And I've been pitching really good at home. And I like to make the joke. You know, my kids are here in Saint Louis right now, so they come to the games. I can't let them see their you know, see their old man giving it up, right, So I

No, don't, don't. Don't bring your kids on the road.

You do not need I'm sure you got a nice suite and everything, but you do not need that.

Yeah, exactly, But it's tough traveling with four kids. Be be real, real tough.

You're you're almost you're almost done. You'll get a lot of time with them. Then, all right, a few more years pitching, you know, you get like three or four, maybe a fifth year pitching, and then you can get you can go home and play with them all the time, all year long.

They don't need to go round.

Road trips are for you know, golfing with the boys and getting a good night's sleep.

There you go, maybe maybe maybe catch a few fish too. But I want to talk about what you said about being an example for the guys. Yeah, dude, you make all of your starts in a day and age. We just got done talk about the Dodgers, where it's like, well, we're picking up these guys to make twenty to twenty five starts.

Do you feel like you're slow? Happen?

Dudes in the face, not just metaphorically slapping him in the face. When you hear that, they're like, oh man, you know I could. You know, we'll see him make twenty to twenty five starts and you're like, I'm making all thirty two. Sorry, And how hard is that to do because you're trying to be an example for young pictures like McGreevy and different guys that are coming up.

Yeah, I think it's you know, that's that's one of the abilities, right. I had a coach before, and he's got all the abilities. One of the abilities is durability or availability. And you know, for someone like myself who, like I heard you guys talking about a minute ago, I don't throw one hundred and ten. So maybe it's easier for me to stay healthy because I'm not throwing one hundred and ten. But you know, that's that's one of those things that I feel like I can really

You know, I domple for my kids. You know, we we eat healthy. We're a healthy family.

And I think all those things tie in together, and I think it a lot of it goes to attitudes.

You know.

I have a running joke with our head trader here.

It says, how's you know, how's miles to that said, I feel great, nothing hurts, I'm in the best shape my life and just you know, having that like that kind of attitude, you can almost mentally trick yourself into just feeling great.

I feel great.

The more you say it, I'll say it a couple of times more, I feel tremendous. I mean great shape, nothing hurts. I'm gonna go run and shag BP and throw a bullpen and lift weights. And you know, I'm gonna empty the tank today because I start on Sunday.

I'm gonna empty the tank. Get used to the heat.

It's hot as all get out here in Saint Louis, and you know I'm gonna get after it. And I'm and I'm gonna get after it for you know, thirty thirty two starts.

So cratch your set at thirty six. You got five more years ago, which I think would be absolutely incredible. Do you think after playing in the MLB, there any any truth to going, you know, back to Japan and playing over there at the MPB any rumored today?

I would love to. I would love to.

It was.

The the more I look back on it, the more I can really appreciate that experience. I mean, the fans I still get, you know, messages from fans and When I talk to the Japanese media, they're always telling me, you know, the Japanese fans are always you know, checking

It's such a clean, safe country. I don't know, forty one.

I don't know.

You're gonna talk to my wife about, you know, me playing until I'm forty one. I'm I'm finishing up nine years this year. Next year would make ten. That's my main focus is just going your year. Finish this year healthy, hopefully finish it strong. So some teams can be interested and you know work, you know kind of work from there. You know, I want to play as long as I can healthy. I've seen what it looks like to be old and really struggle through those last you know, a

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All right, Well, first of all, you can tell your wife.

You can talk to your wife about anything, because you said you look good in a bathing suit.

Yeah, so yeah, that's what.

You put the bathing suit on board, yup and do a front flip and the kids will be like, wow, Dad, you're the best. Plus, and the other part that you just talked about is I'm gonna tell Wayne Right that you said he was broken down, looked terrible in amathing suits.

No, no, no, no, no, not him, not him.

No, it was definitely it was definitely Wayne Right. I'm gonna make sure he knows that, so that we had it here first.

I mean I've i've again, I've seen what that looks like. And that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And he was chasing he was chasing numbers. You know, he was chasing two hundred wins. He was chasing two hundred wins. And he I mean I get almost getting like goosebumps and chills thinking about it when I talk about it, Because when when when you talk about like I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm not gonna play catch today.

I'm gonna save my bullets. You know I'm gonna save them. You're talking about a guy used.

Every single bullet getting two hundred wins. It was the most incredible thing to watch, every single bullet. I mean, he got that two hundred wins. I think he was golfing like next week and he went to throw a pine cone out of a bunker and it just like like it was just noth like all bullets were baseball bullets. Could even throw a pine cone out of the bunker.

Whoop.

You know, after he hits it three hundred yards, you know, a little bit left, maybe maybe right. You know, probably went up and down. It's a great golfer, But talk about just using it. It was incredible. It was an incredible thing to watch and make that run. And I was, you know, I always gonna be a huge fan, best best teammate ever.

All right, I won't. I guess it's not winning, right.

But my question to you, you guys are three and a half out in the wildcard. I say on here all the time, and you guys traded some key pieces to your team, but you go out every day, like you said, to compete. How much is too much at one point of the season, Because I always say three games is so hard to overcome, and you guys are at that three and a half game mark, It is so hard to overcome in August.

How do you guys look at it?

I get it, you're gonna say the whole generic one name at a time, one pitch at a time, and cardinal way, and we're gonna smile and all that stuff. But truly, how much because you don't have a lot of teams in front of you.

Guys. You have one team right now, and they're in your division.

It's the Reds, right, it's the Reds. So we do

Why you say that that three games.

Is tough, right, because we have to win and I think we ran into this last year where like we were playing kind of good at the end of the year, but so is everybody else that was in the mix. Like we would win three in a row and the Mets or Phillies would win three in a row, we wouldn't make up any ground. It's like, man, we just swept we just swept somebody, and we're still three games back. So I'd have to look at those at the other team schedules. You know, maybe the Mets have a really

But maybe we can sweep the Reds and make up some ground.

You know, maybe we can have good series against Pittsburgh that got some good pitching. You know, maybe we can we can steal something from then. We got a couple of games against the Brewers. I mean, they're they're they're way out there. You know, we won seventeen games in a row the one year.

True, you know, true. All you gotta do is win seventeen games.

In a row.

If you guys win seventeen in a row, you will be in the postseason. I'm pretty sure that this much time.

Left we were like it was like twenty games left in the season that year, and it's like all we gotta do is win out and we're good and we can.

We did it.

You know, you talk about losing those bullpen arms. I've been so impressed with our bullpen arms that have come up and down in this organization.

Share.

I mean, you got O'Brien, you got you know, Sponson, you know, Lea heat Fernandez is back up and looking really good.

I mean, you you lose back in bullpen guys.

But like it seems like in this day and age, half the guys every other guy gets called up from Triple A s throwing one hundred was sync or throwing one hundred with a ninety three min hour cut or something like that. And you know, those are the kind of guys that that we brought up and they've been tremendous.

Boom, hell's it coming in.

Here's one hundred and two, shut the door, you know, as opposed to Okay, here comes the ninth.

We're gonna use a little bit lefty, little righty. We got some sync, we got some cut.

But I think we have the bullpen to to to kind of do that and kind of, you know, kind of fill that fill that gap. I've been super impressed with all these young guys coming up out of the bullpen.

Yeah, and hey Tigers last year mid August, they were in a bad spot. Twins collapsed, they row there you go, so all right, yeah, one more for you before we hit the brake. And it could be a little bit of a loaded question, but last weekend you're playing the Cubs.

What was the whole deal with the base coach stuff.

We've had a lot of pitchers on lately that are like, hey, base coach has got to stay in there lane. We don't want anyone you know, looking for tips, the whole deal. So what was going on there?

I think it is that that that's a little question. You know, the box is there. You could stay in the box. I mean, that's why it's there. If the league wants to, you know, make that box bigger. They're making everything bigger. The strike zone is smaller, the zone bigger, the field whatever, they want to make the box bigger, make it bigger.

Other than that, you know, you could stay in your box.

But I think the whole the thing that's different now, like with signs stealing is like the video stuff, right, It's like you know, back in the day, you know, like my rookie year twenty twelve, and then before that, like way back in the day, as a player, you had to have some savvy.

You had to like be on second base and you're looking at signs and you're.

Sneaking or like and even like the video you had to watch was pretty grainy, and you'd have to be on base or the coach would have to be like a wizard at stealing signs. And and you know, now you've got you know, five guys probably sitting in a room just ripping through video looking for like oh, the freckle on the back of his neck moves an inch to the left when he's throwing a curveball. It's like, well, that's kind of ridiculous, Like I don't I can't control

Right, Like there there's there's gamesmanship there. There there's there's gamesmanship.

There's like okay, like you're going second sign at second base, like we're picking him up all day because he's second signed. And then there's oh, our scouts ripped through the whole video, like this is why we have pitch com now, because you got people and I'm not gonna name names. You got stadiums with the camera in center field flashing, lights moving, blinking.

You know what's coming.

He's halfway down the line, and then you're gonna be like, oh, you know, thank god, I hit that ball.

No, dude, thank your coach. He's halfway down the line stealing pitches.

Cause I got my tight to the chest like this, trying not to hide it, and he's and he's getting all you know, he's Lee Harvey Oswald in the book Depository with all the angles, trying to trying to do what he's doing, you know, sniping you know, sniping signs out of the glove. Yeah, so if if I'm so bad at it, you know, my glove's here, I'm coming up like you know, wiggling the ball in my hand and you can see the split grip or something like that, Like, yeah,

No they're not.

It's not.

But if you're going above and beyond, it's a it's a moral it's an ethics question. I gotta see in moral ethics in college. I'm not the right guy to ask, maybe, but it's a moral and ethics question. Where do you draw the line that this is ethical and this is not right?

Beautifully stated that that is the mic drop moment, perfect monologue, and it's a big topic that I think is not getting enough play. So I knew you'd have one of the best answers of all time that basically took me through a history lesson.

There's feeling signs of thett League World Series and they're not supposed to because the gamesmanship, right, it's it's little league.

Just hit the ball or don't you know?

And we got little feeling signs and they're supposed to eject the kid. I saw some kid got ejected for throwing his batway up in the air.

I was ready for that one too, Todd father, did you know where he was going there?

I got, yeah, yeah, they give warnings. Now you steal signs in second base, they give warnings, and then it turns out to be a bigger problem if that keeps going. So yeah, I remember, you know the kid. The kids like out over out over fastball, like they would like point and give you the sign of what's going on. So interesting, very interesting stuff in the little league baseball.

I didn't know. So you can't steal signs? How how can they tell if you're sneaky enough with it?

Well, I mean as a twelve year old, really sneaky of going like this, Well, they don't have to, you know, hold the right arm down for a fastball, you know, and then you'll confuse them and it's hard, it's hard, for sure. They're very they show it for sure.

That's the good stuff there. That was an all timer. That that rant from Miles Michaelis took me on a journey for real.

I did a great guess. I didn't want it to end. I didn't want to me.

Neither me neither. But somebody, Yeah, we were well, we were being yelled at for for for commercial breaks and all that. But also I legitimately the connection FROs.

He ran out of minutes, He ran out of minutes, or maybe or maybe somebody from the MLB offices shut his phone down.

They were like, stop, we're gonna need to.

Do an investigation one year after all the stuff happened, since we're not proactive on anything. It.

There's a reason why I'm bringing up this topic to pictures lately. Right, you know, there's conversations that happen with players and stuff on the field, right, and it doesn't really hit the mainstream, and then all of a sudden it explodes. This feels like one of those topics. It always is with signs stealing, But this feels like the next chapter does it?

Not watch?

Just watch, just watch, because they don't have the same ways to steal signs or steal pitches. Just watch, just watch the game.

Yeah, I mean I even think, you know, again, I start looking at certain teams home road records whatever. I'm not going to throw too much out there yet because I have my conspiracy theories too, But just pay attention to everything going on when you're hearing pictures like this and other pictures we've had on recently, including Schoogle, point things out.

You heard it.

By the way, we found out Miles Michael his phone overheated. So yeah, if you're trying to make phone calls in a sauna, or if you're in your car and it's hot out and you turn it off and then you put it on the dashboard to use as your camera for a national television show, it might do that little temperature dial and say, oops, sorry, you can't do what you're doing. So Miles, you're the man. Thanks for joining us.