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, manager Mike Matheny wondered if, after all that, he would recognize the new pitcher, life-sized. A scout assured him, they’d know.