Mlodzinski's stuff 'can't be real'

It can get pretty rainy in Cape Cod during the summer, which creates problems for the teams up there. The Cape Cod league is arguably the premier college baseball summer league, but last year, teams had to battle the elements more often than usual. A particularly rainy summer threw off almost every pitcher's thrown schedule at least once.

Towards the end of the summer, Carmen Mlodzinski had had enough. He was supposed to throw that day, but it was pouring. He wasn't going to let that stop him this time, and he went out to the outfield.

Mike Landry, his pitching coach for that summer, went out with him. Mlodzinski playfully warned him not to stop him. Landry didn't, and Mlodzinski got his work done in the pouring rain.

“I don’t think either one of us were able to wear the shoes we wore that day for at least three or four days," Landry jokingly reflected to me.

Mlodzinski was one of the best pitchers in the Cape last year, aided by an upper-90s sinker that moves and a newfound cutter-slider hybrid. The Pirates cited that performance in the Cod as one of the reasons why they drafted him in the first round, 31st overall.

There were plenty of other things to like about him, too.

“He has a variety of pitches that can move in different directions,” Pirates amateur scouting director Joe DelliCarri said during a Zoom call Wednesday. “That’s first and foremost. He’s worked on a little bit of cutter as well as a slider, curveball and makes his fastball move to both sides of the plate.

"It’s simple for us: Competitor, strong and he can really make the ball move.”

"Competitor" might be an understatement. Everything was a competition in the Mlodzinski house growing up, even washing the dishes. ("We have a timer on the microwave going to see if we can beat the clock.” In case you were wondering how that's possible). Just one of the many quirks of a 21-year-old who still uses an iPhone 5, cracks jokes during mound visits, would rather listen to 90s rock than the radio and used to do his homework in the locker room on the team laptops that were used for scouting.

Not surprisingly, he carries that competitive nature to the mound, too.

“He is fierce. With fierce comes intensity,” DelliCarri said. “He’s learned to harness some of that. We don’t want to take a lot of that away from him.”



Landry only worked with him for a couple months, but he saw that fierceness quickly.

"Sometimes it’s quieter, but it’s always there," Landry said. "Whether it’s the way he’s thinking about the game, whether it’s the way he’s performing, whether it’s the way he’s practicing, he definitely has an intensity about him that’s cerebral. Very targeted to getting the job done to the best of his ability.”

Mlodzinski has the pitching tools and intensity the Pirates were looking for, he does not have a huge college sample size. After bouncing between the rotation and bullpen in his freshman season, he made just seven appearances for the South Carolina Gamecocks the past two years.

“Flying under the radar, I guess, is a good way to put it,” Mlodzinski said Thursday on a Zoom call. “It’s always good to be an underdog.”

Mlodzinski's junior season was limited to just four starts before the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the majority of the college season. Entering his sophomore year, he thought he had a real chance to be the staff's ace, so he pushed himself hard. Too hard, resulting in a stress problem in his left foot.

In his third start that year, facing Clemson, he stumbled off the mound and broke a bone in his left foot.

“[I learned] a lot — a lot with the foot injury, both on the mental and the physical side,” Mlodzinski said. “I’ve always been somebody who has just worked as hard as I could, but I was definitely overdoing it [trying to push through the injury] … I’m not just consistently putting pressure on myself to compete. I can get away from the game a little bit [now].”

His pitching coach at South Carolina, Skylar Meade, said that time away ended up being a blessing in disguise. He ended up getting stronger, and as a result, was able to start repeating his mechanics better.

“In a weird way, it was the greatest thing that happened in his career," Meade was telling me over the phone. "He was able to put on a lot of weight, had a great summer up in the Cape. He put in work to get better, and now he’s going to be a millionaire."

The 31st pick in the draft carries a slot value of $2.312 million.

Mlodzinski pitched for Falmouth in the Cape Cod league, where he recorded a 1.83 ERA over the regular season and playoffs, striking out 43 and walking five over 34.1 innings. It was a performance that put him on the map for most teams.

“I felt it was coming," Mlodzinski said about his breakout in Cape Cod. "I thought it was going to be my sophomore year, and then obviously I found out I was overworking my body a little bit and had one of those freakish kind of injuries. I knew that some good was going to come out of it.”

Dallas Beaver was one of Mlodzinski's victims in the Cape. He was transferring to South Carolina and was going to be his catcher the following spring, so the two got to know each other a bit. The two talked for a bit before their first game against one another, and as Beaver was heading to his dugout, he was told Mlodzinski could hit 98 mph with the pitch moving the length of the plate.

“That can’t be real," Beaver told me he remembered thinking. "I get in the box, first pitch, bang. And I’m like, ‘oh my goodness.’”

Mlodzinski was in good form the day he faced Beaver, striking out 10 of the 18 batters he faced. The first time he would catch him, Beaver got a little nervous.

"I’ve never seen stuff like this before,” Beaver said.

When asked what's the difference between seeing a Mlodzinski fastball as a batter and as a catcher, Beaver quipped, “I know what’s coming. Thank god.”

Not bad for a guy who only started pitching about two and a half years earlier.

Mlodzinski was originally recruited by South Carolina as a two-way player, with the emphasis being more as a position player. However, the Gamecocks always liked his arm strength, so after his junior year in high school, they told him to focus more on pitching.

"I still view myself as a potential infielder or position player in college,” he joked.

At that point, he only had pitched about 10 innings in high school, but he worked to develop a four-seam fastball and a spike curve. When he got to South Carolina, he was told they wanted him just to be a pitcher.

“My whole freshman year was just an experiment year for me," Mlodzinski said. "I didn’t really have a whole lot of time to develop in high school and figure out what I was going to use in college, so that whole freshman year was really finding out what was going to work for me.”

Sometimes there was a bit too much experimenting. Meade would joke that Mlodzinski was trying to get a master's in pitching before he got his bachelor's.

“I told him to be Carmen. Don’t be Corey Kluber," Meade said.

The Kluber influences continued before his sophomore year. He still had the four-seamer, but the sinker started to become his primary fastball. Meade said he was blessed with a naturally good arm path, and with some slight tweaks to his hand and arm slot.

He also started working on a slider-cutter hybrid.

“We thought to ourselves that we need something that’s not the fastball that he can throw in different counts," Meade said. "Something that goes straight to the left. We needed left-handers to stop leaning out over him."

He didn't get to use it much his sophomore year, but it became a weapon in the Cape. Sinkerballers aren't traditionally strikeout pitchers, but the two pitches break differently and play off one another, giving hitters headaches.

"That pitch was a difference maker for him,” Meade said.

It's still evolving, too. The goal is for it to become just a slider rather than a cutter, adding a bit more movement and spin to the mix.

Beaver is confident that he'll get it. He's seen the work Mlodzinski has already done, and that intensity he brings does not stop in just games or washing dishes.

And he thinks it's what is going to make Mlodzinski a Major-Leaguer.

“I’ve never seen a kid have as much care for every ball that left his hand, whether it was playing catch, bullpens or his weekend start,” Beaver said.