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.”
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