Cardinals: Miles Mikolas’ hilarious claim on Dodgers — ‘Playing checkbook baseball’

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Miles Mikolas will have a tough assignment right out of the gate of the 2024 MLB season. Mikolas has been named the team’s starter in the Cards’ Game No. 1 of the new campaign against the powerful and star-laden Los Angeles Dodgers on Mar. 29 at Dodger Stadium.

Just less than two weeks away from facing Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers, Mikolas dropped one hilarious shot at Los Angeles, particularly regarding how much money LA spent in the offseason as compared with that of most other teams, including the Cardinals.

“We’re not exactly a low payroll team, but you got the Dodgers playing checkbook baseball,” Mikolas said (h/t
John Denton of MLB.com).

“We’re going to be the hardest working group of Midwestern farmers we can be. … It would be great to stick it to the Dodgers,” Mikolas added.

Before facing the Cardinals, the Dodgers will have already played two games in the regular season, as they are scheduled to kick off their campaign in South Korea during a two-game series against the San Diego Padres this week.

The Cardinals’ offseason is not as splashy as Los Angeles, but there’s really no team out there that has made bigger signings during the long break than the Dodgers. The acquisition alone of Ohtani made the Dodgers the clear winners of the MLB offseason. Yet, they managed to make it even better by signing Japanese superstar hurler Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

The Dodgers enter the 2024 MLB season with the ninth-highest payroll ($214,721,666) in the majors, per Spotrac. The Cardinals, on the other hand, are 10th on the list ($164,301,667).

Still, the Cardinals haven’t been entirely quiet. For one, they signed a trio of veteran arms in the form of Sonny Gray, Kyle Gibson, and Lance Lynn.

Miles Mikolas looking to build on 2023 All-Star season with the Cardinals

Mikolas earned his second All-Star nod in the majors in 2023 when he went 9-13 with a 4.78 ERA across 35 starts for St. Louis.

The Cardinals missed the playoffs in 2023, finishing just fifth in the National League Central division with a 71-91 record. Before that, St. Louis made it to the postseason for four seasons in a row, including an NL Championship Series appearance in 2019.