Thursday BP: Remembering Austin Slater’s first grand slam (against the Cardinals)

Good Morning, baseball fans!

The San Francisco Giants welcome the St. Louis Cardinals to town today to kick off a four-game series at Oracle Park.

Miles Mikolas is starting for the Cardinals, and as I was doing my research for the gamethread, I realized why that name sounded so familiar to me. Then I saw Austin Slater’s stats against him and started laughing.

The last time the Giants faced Mikolas, Austin Slater hit his first career grand slam off of him.

And we were there to see it! It was the last time we did a McCovey Chronicles meet-up game in July of 2019. What a simpler time that was.

Early in the game, I was seated front row for an argument between our former and forever McCovey Chronicles staff members Carmen Kiew and Bryan Murphy, who were arguing about Austin Slater. Carmen insisted that Slater was better than he was given credit for. Later in the game, it was like the baseball gods intervened to prove her point when Slater hit a grand slam to take a commanding lead in a game they would go on to win 8-4.

It was great fun and I hope to do another one of those some day. In the meantime, since MLB hates letting you post its videos anywhere else, let’s take a look at that one again in this post from MLB.com’s Maria Guardado to get this series kicked off right.

What time do the Giants play today?

First pitch for tonight’s game is at 6:45 pm.