CHICAGO — By the time so many of the Cubs had circled the bases and the box-score ink dried on the Cardinals’ losing season, two young relievers needed 72 pitches to get six outs. Gordon Graceffo and Chris Roycroft, two relievers their manager said the club is “going to need,” allowed eight runs and 10 baserunners in the final two innings, and the hope after the loss was they wouldn’t give it a second thought.
“I don’t want them to look too closely at it,” manager Oli Marmol said.
They can, however, learn a lot from it.
The Cardinals had the tying run up in the top of the seventh inning in what was a relatively close game until it absolutely was not. The bottom of that inning erupted into a seven-run Vesuvius that scorched the two relievers and sent the Cardinals to a 12-1 shellacking Friday afternoon at Wrigley Field. The loss assured the Cardinals (78-82) assured their second losing season in the past three and only their third of the 2000s. That’s history. Immediately after the game, the discussion was already moving on.
In his office, Marmol and pitching coach Dusty Blake talked through the evaluations they could take from the seventh inning to talk with Graceffo and Roycroft about Saturday that sets them up for what’s been the focus all along — the future.
“I think you don’t look too closely at it as far as letting it drive your mood going into the offseason,” Marmol said. “But dissect it enough to understand what to gather from it. What not to. Some of the things you gather from it are a continuation of things we’ve already had conversations about. So you just continue to drive those things home. Because we need them to be good. We do. So we need to keep that mindset regardless of outcomes.”
The Cubs scored four runs on three homers off starter Miles Mikolas and led 4-1 going into the bottom of the seventh inning. Graceffo entered to hold the score there.
The Cardinals had emptied their bullpen of late-inning preferences to win the series in San Francisco and they intend to stay away form Kyle Leahy on Friday and Saturday so he can start Sunday’s game. All of that fed into something Marmol and his staff also wanted to do: Get Graceffo and Roycroft, two right-handed relievers who have bounced between levels and performance this season, into the hot-house of a Cubs game at Wrigley. How better, Marmol explained, to help them pitch in that atmosphere than to get them in that atmosphere.
They both started their outings the same way.
Graceffo walked the leadoff hitter.
Roycroft walked his first hitter.
Trouble followed.
“The first thing for me is you can’t come in the game and walk the first guy,” Graceffo said Friday evening in the visitors’ clubhouse. “The margin for error is slimmer (in the majors). Making sure your focus level is there. You know you’re not going to be able to really reach back for an extra mile per hour or throw something nastier than you did. You have to hit your spot and locate everything because the margin for error is so slim.”
Graceffo fell behind his first batter 2-0 and eventually walked Dansby Swanson on seven pitches. Swanson stole second while Graceffo was striking out the second batter of the inning. Then everything went sideways. Matt Shaw tripled home the Cubs’ fifth run, and Michael Busch followed with an RBI double. Graceffo got ahead on Busch, 0-2, and then failed to land a curveball that Busch missed until he hung one that Busch definitely didn’t.
The final four batters Graceffo faced got hits, and eventually all would score. The right-hander threw 31 pitches to get one out.
“Keep it simple with the evaluation,” Graceffo said. “You can’t walk the first guy. You’ve got to finish guys with two strikes. The couple of things I did wrong and I paid for it.”
Graceffo left behind two runners for Roycroft to deal with, and Roycroft added to the traffic by walking his first batter, Kyle Tucker. That loaded the bases for Seiya Suzuki. What followed was similar to how the inning spiraled for Graceffo. Roycroft fell behind, 2-0. He tried to get back in the count with his best pitch, landing one sinker and leaving another too high and over the plate.
Suzuki put it in the seats for his second career grand slam, his 30th home run of the season, and his 98th, 99th, 100th, and 101st RBIs.
The Cardinals did not get the second out of the inning until their 50th pitch of the inning.
“It’s being able to slow it down enough from pitch one so the game doesn’t take it to you,” Marmol said.
He did not have to look far for an example.
While it took the bullpen 92 pitches to get the final nine outs of the rout, Mikolas pitched through the fifth for 15 outs on only 79. He paid for some of this strikes by allowing homers, including a two-run shot by Pete Crow-Armstrong that turned a 1-0 game into the Cubs’ first significant lead. But Mikolas didn’t alter his rhythm, didn’t waver — and the same approach he had in his first 202 starts for the Cardinals he maintained in his 203rd and what could be his last.
“I like to think that I’ve always been a little bit stubborn or overconfident in my stuff,” Mikolas said. “The attitude does get me in trouble sometimes: Hit it or don’t. I’m not out there to waste my time or a hitter’s time or the umpire’s time or everyone in the stands — wasting their time dancing around the zone. I like to pitch aggressive and see how that works out for me. (I learned) the important of throwing strikes — especially early.”
Mikolas retired the first batter of every inning he pitched.
The three home runs he allowed for a total of nine this season in two Wrigley starts did not do much damage because he kept batters off base in front of them. Crow-Armstrong’s came after a single and on a breaking ball, but also with two outs in the inning. That alone contrasted with the two relievers who entered, walked the first batter, and then tried to dance their way free of the trouble instead of bulldozing through it.
“My guys get into trouble when guys throw balls out of the zone,” Mikolas said. “You can also get death by a thousand cuts or you can get singled to death. But I think a lot of times, when you start getting outside the zone a lot, it can look to the other team like you’re pitching scared. It can be a mental thing. You’re not in the zone, so you’re afraid to throw strikes. A lot of other things kind of compound, whether you realize it or not.”
It’s impossible to not realize how things compounded in the seventh.
The leadoff walk became an issue almost immediately for Graceffo as the tumbled into the back-to-back extra-base hits. The leadoff walk by Roycroft meant he had nowhere to put Suzuki and had to challenge him in a way that he could have with Tucker and a base open. Graceffo said he would go back and look at his outing Saturday but already knew what he will find. It’s something he and the Cardinals have seen in other outings, and part of the discussion with Blake was about what they could do this offseason to help him improve.
One idea they’ll try to implement immediately.
Get both Graceffo and Roycroft back into a game this weekend.
“You want to see them in this environment, right?” Marmol said. “Hopefully, we can give them another touch so they don’t end that way.”
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Derrick Goold | Post-Dispatch
Lead baseball writer
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