Things got heated early in this Cardinals vs. Brewers matchup. In the first inning, Cardinals pitcher Miles Mikolas took issue with two missed strike calls that led to walks, including one with the bases loaded. Pitch tracking backed him up both times, showing the pitches clipped the strike zone. The umpire didn’t see it that way, and the Cardinals sideline started to stir. In the second inning, a double play call went against the Cardinals too. They challenged and won it, but manager Oli Marmol was already visibly frustrated. Then again in the third, the Brewers tried turning two. The first base umpire called the runner out, but replay showed he was safe. Marmol had enough and lit into the umps for what he saw as a string of bad calls.
The audio got picked up during the back-and-forth, revealing Marmol yelling at the first base umpire and then getting into it with the home plate ump, who was defending his partner. Both sides stood their ground, unleashing a string of expletives, with Marmol calling the missed pitch calls game-changing and demanding better. He wasn’t ejected but made his presence known. After the game, he said the rant wasn’t personal, just a way to fire up a slumping team. He believed it worked. The whole sequence gave fans a chaotic but entertaining look at the tension that can boil over when the calls don’t go a team’s way.