Jacob Misiorowski struck out the first seven Rockies hitters he saw on Sunday night, and the part that should scare the rest of the National League is that he wasn’t anywhere near his own ceiling.
Misiorowski broke his own MLB record for triple-digit pitches in a game for the second time this season, and the bar he set back in June didn’t even last two months. At some point that stops being a fact about one dominant start and starts being a fact about how deep this rotation actually goes.
Two more consecutive strikeouts and he’d have tied the actual MLB record for punchouts to open a game.
Instead he settled for the Milwaukee Brewers franchise record — seven straight to start the game — on his way to 12 strikeouts and one hit over five innings, with 12 of the first 13 Rockies hitters going down. NBC Sports has him as the first pitcher since the live-ball era began in 1920 with 11-plus strikeouts and zero hits through four innings. The only blemish: a fifth-inning solo homer from Cole Carrigg, the one hit Colorado managed all night.
That’s the strikeout side. The velocity side is where this gets genuinely stupid.
Misiorowski threw 83 pitches against Colorado, and 66 of them were at least 100 mph, breaking his own MLB record for triple-digit pitches in a start — he’d set the previous mark in June against Philadelphia at 58. He also threw 33 pitches at 103-plus, more than double the old record of 14, and CBS Sports has him topping out at 104.7 mph, a number that shouldn’t exist outside a maxed-out video game slider.
MLB’s own account posted the sequence, because of course they did:
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/2081455733980172615
Watch the clip back and the swings look normal. That’s the unsettling part: hitters aren’t overswinging or panicking, they’re taking their normal, professional cuts and still missing by a foot.
That said, the Brewers pulled him after those 83 pitches. There’s a perfectly boring reason why: he’s already closing in on last season’s career high in innings, and nobody in Milwaukee wants to find out what happens when you push a 100-mph arm past its limit in July.
Zoom out and the numbers get almost unfair. Misiorowski is sitting on a 1.58 ERA through 20 starts, leads all of baseball in strikeouts by 18, and owns the best strikeout rate in the sport at 40.6 percent — over a full season, not a hot stretch. Add Sunday to the pile and you get the most underrated season in baseball.
Go back to the 15-strikeout Maddux he threw in June and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with a single start. This rotation can bury a franchise-record night behind a pitcher this good, and that’s exactly what’s still standing in October after everyone else’s arms have given out.
I had the over on strikeouts before this game and I still somehow feel like I lost money on it. That’s the tax for betting against professional hitters who now have to guess right just to foul a pitch off.
