Almost all of what the Cardinals saw of Miles Mikolas' reinvention as a pitcher in Japan was the byte-sized view offered by video clips they played and replayed again on a laptop or tablet. What they knew of how tall he was, how he looked, how his hair flowed all came from numbers on a sheet or images bound by the four edges of a screen.
As he waited in a hotel bustling with baseball people this past winter, former manager Mike Matheny wondered if, after all that, he would recognize the new pitcher, life-sized. A scout assured him, they'd know. The 6-foot-5 Floridian with the dirty blond mane bouncing through the lobby was hard to miss. He stood out in a crowd.
In the market for a starter, the Cardinals had also been expanding their footprint in the Asian market _ and these two paths met at Mikolas, with a tech twist. Hits like Seung Hwan Oh and misses shaped how the Cardinals' decoded statistics from the Asian leagues, and when they sifted through data looking for a pitcher, Mikolas, as he did in the lobby, stood out. His numbers "lit up our analytical department," an official said. From there, technology intertwined with traditional scouting. Cardinals evaluators and coaches, who wouldn't see Mikolas' Japan starts in person, could watch him on the nearest handheld computer.
Video revealed the All-Star.
"From just the eye test, he passes that in a second. Physical. He has presence," said John Mozeliak, president of baseball operations. "Candidly, the things that were just eye-popping were the very, very, very single-digit walk-rate and a high strikeout rate in a league that is high contact. I will say Miles, to us, checked a lot of boxes. ... Actually, in the end, it was very traditional scouting because in today's day and age we rely so much on analytics and, here we were, really having a chance to focus on scouts' opinions."
The initial return has been as novel as the scouting that landed Mikolas. The 29-year-old right-hander was the first Cardinal selected for this year's All-Star Game, hosted Tuesday in Washington, and he's the first starter the Cardinals have signed as a free agent to represent the Cardinals since Chris Carpenter did (2005, '06, '10). Mikolas is also the only Cardinals starting pitcher ever to be an All-Star in his first season after signing as a free agent. The Cardinals thought enough of the steadiest member of their rotation to squeeze in an extra start for him Sunday, making him ineligible to pitch in the Midsummer Classic.
He'll attend with teammate Yadier Molina and be beside peers at Nationals Park after a 10-3 start and 2.65 ERA in his return to the majors.
After three seasons in Japan, Mikolas sought a chance for a second act and was lured by the Cardinals' two-year, $15.5-million offer and their spring training site, his hometown of Jupiter, Fla. The Cardinals went a long way to unearth a talent in their backyard. However, they didn't have a scout see him in person in his final season with the Yomuiri Giants, and instead informed their interest based on past scouting reports and a new, expansive (and internal) use of video.
They were able to scout global, locally.
It's an approach leaking into other talent pools.
