ST. LOUIS -- In 20 brief major-league appearances since last September, Kyle Nicolas has quickly experienced both the ups and downs that come with pitching at the highest level. He's endured the growing pains any young reliever inevitably will and has put together some performances worthy of praise from those around him.
The latter includes a scoreless showing Wednesday night against the Cardinals in which Nicolas struck out five of the six batters he faced, including the seventh inning where he needed just 12 pitches to retire Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado and Nolan Gorman on strikes.
"I'm pretty close with Kyle and I talked to him the other day just about the quality of stuff coming out. Obviously those couple games didn't go how he wanted, but it's closer stuff. It's some of the best stuff I've caught," Henry Davis said following Wednesday's game. "I think the conversations we had, conversations he had with Oscar (Marin), getting a little bit more to the center of the mound that it doesn't necessarily feel like he's throwing at as much of an angle keeps him over the plate, and that's all that matters. When he's in the zone, it's unhittable, and tonight I felt like I could call any pitch at any count. Credit to him and credit to Oscar for making an adjustment and wanting to build on that."
Through 16 appearances this season, Nicolas has registered 23 strikeouts through 16 2/3 innings and struggled with a 15.1% walk rate. He's talked about making mental and mechanical adjustments to help lower that latter number, including simplifying things and limiting unnecessary movements in his delivery in order to be around the zone more.
"It's just having him trust his stuff in the zone," Derek Shelton said. "I mean, we saw him pitch in the Dodgers series and get (Shohei) Ohtani and (Mookie) Betts out back to back. We just have to continue to make sure that he stays in a positive mindset and stays on the plate, because he's got really good stuff."
In this latest appearance, Nicolas focused on executing with a simplified approach and threw with confidence, leading to arguably his most successful outing of the season. But he hopes this is just the start of more consistency coming out of the bullpen.
"I feel like if you take a sigh of relief, that's where you start to take another step backwards," Nicolas said. "Definitely not relieved, I'm still not satisfied with just this outing. Definitely something to build off of and keep pushing forward."
