Miles Mikolas was tossed from the Cardinals’ loss to the Chicago Cubs on Thursday after he intentionally threw at Ian Happ, not once, but twice. The move was retaliatory after Happ’s backswing injured Cardinals catcher Wilson Contreras.
On 670 The Score Friday morning, David Haugh and Leila Rahimi listened to the play-by-play calls of the incident from the Cubs’ radio crew and from both teams’ television crews. The reaction to the ejection sounded very different on Bally Sports Midwest.
Chip Caray and Brad Thompson were incensed that Mikolas would be ejected. Thompson argued that the pitch that hit Happ hit him squarely in the hip, which is what a pitcher is supposed to do. Haugh noted that every other broadcaster saw it differently. He even pointed out that on Marquee Sports Network, Cubs TV voice Book Sciambi instantly recognized what was about to happen.
“Brad Thompson sounded a little bit over the top, sounded a little crazy defending Miles Mikolas there,” he said. “Miles Mikolas did a dumb thing.”
While Thompson was called out for saying the umpire had no “feel for the game” in ejecting Mikolas, Rahimi pointed out that Caray’s words may not have been as ridiculous, but the delivery made them just as silly.
“He sounded real swaggy,” she said of Caray. “He’s like, ‘message sent,’ and you can kind of see like the puffery of the chest there. The sympathetic puffery. And then he’s like, ‘and another message sent’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah, okay.’”
Before Mikolas chose to throw at Ian Happ, the Cubs’ outfielder went to check on Contreras to make sure he was okay. The two are reportedly friends and even hugged to show there were no hard feelings as trainers took Contreras off the field.
Haugh and Rahimi pointed out that every other broadcaster made note of how out of line it was for Mikolas to retaliate against something that clearly was not an issue to the player that got injured. Only the Bally Sports Midwest booth seemed to think an ejection was out of line.
