Miles Mikolas is 37 years old, carries a 5.65 ERA this season, and hadn’t stepped into the batter’s box since 2021. None of that mattered on August 5, 2026, when Nationals manager Blake Butera ran out of position players in the 11th inning against the Philadelphia Phillies and had exactly one option left: send his pitcher up to hit.
Mikolas laid down a perfect safety squeeze, scoring CJ Abrams from third base and blowing the game wide open. Washington erupted for six runs in the inning and walked away with a 10-4 win — snapping a seven-game losing streak in about the most unlikely way imaginable.
How the Bench Disappeared
The position bench was already gone before the 11th inning arrived, the result of a chain of tactical moves that left Butera with no conventional options. The breaking point came when Andrew Pinckney entered as a pinch runner for Abimelec Ortiz. The moment Pinckney took the field, Washington automatically lost its designated hitter, which meant the pitcher had to slot into the batting order.
Butera knew right then that if the spot came up, someone from the bullpen would have to dig in at the plate. Mikolas wasn’t a random pick. Among all the available arms, he was the only one with real hitting experience — he spent years batting in the National League with the St. Louis Cardinals before the NL adopted the universal DH in 2022. Four years later, with the rule firmly in place across both leagues, that old experience was suddenly worth more than any position player who no longer existed in the dugout.
The Play Itself
What Mikolas executed was a safety squeeze — the controlled version of the bunt play, where the runner at third waits to see contact before breaking for home. It’s not the suicide squeeze, where the runner commits before the pitch. This one demands that the batter actually make contact, or the runner is dead. Mikolas made contact. Abrams scored. And the Nationals kept right on scoring.
The Game Belonged to CJ Abrams
The squeeze was the viral moment, but CJ Abrams carried the night. Washington’s shortstop reached base four times and collected three hits, including the triple that put a runner on third in the first place. Without that triple, there’s no squeeze, no six-run inning, no story.
Brady House added a pinch-hit home run, and Will Dion made his Nationals debut in the same game. For a team in rebuild mode that showed up to the week on a seven-game skid, winning 10-4 in extra innings like this carries a different kind of weight.
As for Mikolas, his starting numbers — 3-7, 5.65 ERA in 22 appearances — haven’t been convincing. But out of the bullpen, he’s been a different pitcher: 4.04 ERA, 1.10 WHIP and an 8.8 K-BB% across 49 innings. Those are numbers that justify a roster spot. The fact that he can also lay down a bunt in a crisis is, let’s say, a bonus nobody expected to cash in on.
A Play That Feels Like It’s From Another Era
The squeeze play has 132 years of history — it was first recorded in an 1894 college game at Yale. For decades it was a staple of small-ball strategy, but the power-hitting era of the last two decades has nearly buried it. Today it shows up occasionally, in very specific situations, and almost never with a pitcher in the batter’s box.
That it happened in 2026, four years after the NL went full-time DH, makes it even more of an anachronism. There’s no verified record that it’s an all-time historical first — pitchers have batted in bench-empty situations before — but the context makes it the kind of moment that’s genuinely hard to replicate in the modern game.
Mikolas has always had a knack for adapting to unusual circumstances. He spent three seasons in Japanese baseball with the Yomiuri Giants from 2015 to 2017, going 31-13 with a 2.18 ERA in 62 starts. He knows how to read the game from angles most pitchers never consider. That doesn’t guarantee anything with a bat in hand — but this time, with the bench empty and a losing streak to kill, it was more than enough.
