Skubal-Miz matchup not just rare -- it's nearly unprecedented

By Mike Petriello | 4:10 PM EDT

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Game 1 of the National League Championship Series is a phenomenal matchup between Brewers right-hander Jacob Misiorowski and Dodgers left-hander Tarik Skubal. It is, by any measure, an absolutely scintillating starting pitching pairing.

On one side: The presumptive 2026 NL Cy Young winner. The almost certain hardest-throwing-starting-pitcher-to-ever-live. The most difficult starter to ever get a hit off of in a single season in history. That’s Misiorowski, who rolls in with a 1.80 ERA, one of the exceptionally few times in the last 50 years that a qualified starter has had an ERA under 2.00.

On the other side: The back-to-back reigning AL Cy Young winner, itself an exceptionally rare feat, and only not in contention for a third straight because he was traded from the AL to the NL at the Deadline. The man who leads the Majors in pitching WAR over the last three seasons, and also led the NL in pitching WAR after the trade. The elite arm who returned from elbow surgery so quickly that the entire procedure, the "Skubal Scope," now honorarily carries his name.

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This matchup has everything you could want, on the field and off. First, these are two of the best pitchers in baseball. No righty starter had a lower Statcast “expected ERA” than Misiorowski did; only one left-hander was higher than Skubal.

There's also the context in which this matchup is taking place, with Misiorowski leading a Milwaukee team desperate for revenge after getting swept out of the playoffs by the Dodgers in last year's NLCS, and still looking for the first World Series title in franchise history. And you have Skubal, a pending free agent and much-hyped trade acquisition, trying to lead the Dodgers to a rare World Series title three-peat.

It’s more than that, too. It’s got the added juice of seeing the Brewers try to fight off Skubal, given that their decision not to be the highest bidder at the Deadline meant that they risked this exact situation. It’s not enough to say that they pitched well enough without him; it’s that if they lose, and that comes in part because he shut their offense down, then that’s a choice that will be debated in Wisconsin forever.

Oh, and one more thing: We might get this matchup twice, given that they’d both be lined up for a potential Game 5 at Dodger Stadium.

Good luck, hitters. You’re going to need it.

Naturally, this all made us wonder: Have we seen a postseason starting pitching matchup with this much juice before? It’s true that Misiorowski, barely more than a year into his career, has a long, long way to go before he can really be talked about with the same reverence as those who have had accomplished, Hall of Fame careers, but also, he’s getting the ball right now and he’s currently pitching just about as well as you can.

The timing part is crucial; pitchers like Steve Carlton and Tom Seaver are deservedly inner-circle legends, but a matchup in the years in their late 30s and early 40s, when they weren’t very good, just wouldn’t be the same, either. Great, long careers are one thing. Pitching as well as you can headed into this specific game is another.

So how do we pinpoint that? Let’s just give you the answer before we get to the “how,” so that we can say this: It’s in the top 1% of postseason pitching matchups of the last 55 years.

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One way to quantify pitchers is with Baseball Savant’s “Enhanced Game Score,” which starts with the decades-old metric of Game Score, which adds or subtracts points for traditional box score things like innings, outs, strikeouts, walks, and hits. (Game Score says that Kerry Wood’s legendary 20-strikeout game in 1998 is the single best nine-inning start ever.) But Enhanced Game Score takes that and adds in some modernization from MLB Senior Data Architect Tom Tango, and then puts it all in the form of a rolling, 1,000-day window, with more weight given to recent events.

This all goes back to 1971, and it lets you find out not only who the best pitcher at any given time was, but when that happened. For example, the No. 1 pitcher on record by this method is Pedro Martinez, which should surprise no one. His peak date, showing the weighted 1,000-day rolling window where he was most dominant, came on May 31, 2001, which makes a whole lot of sense given that his 1999 and 2000 seasons are routinely included on any good list of “best pitching seasons ever.” He then started 2001 by posting a 1.44 ERA through the end of May, with 121 strikeouts in 11 starts.

Martinez is followed by Clayton Kershaw (peaking in 2016), Vida Blue (1971), Dwight Gooden (1986), and Greg Maddux (1995), with great runs from Tom Seaver and other legends not far behind. Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Steve Carlton and other luminaries all rate highly.

You can also simply see the shape of a player’s career this way, because if we plot the rolling average of our two Game 1 starters with that of, say, Chris Sale, you can see that Skubal and Misiorowski were on an upward trajectory from the start, which is also where Sale started. But Sale had a mid-career dip as he fought injuries late in his Boston tenure, before rebounding back to greatness with Atlanta. They got there differently, but they're similarly valuable now.

By this method, today’s current top five pitchers are 1) Skubal, 2) Yoshinobu Yamamoto, 3) Sale, 4) Misiorowski, and 5) Cam Schlittler. You can do this for any date, really; to pick one at random, the top five on Aug. 15, 1990, was 1) Clemens, 2) Orel Hershiser, 3) Dave Stewart, 4) Bret Saberhagen, and 5) Frank Viola. On the same date in 1975? 1) Seaver, 2) Andy Messersmith, 3) Bert Blyleven, 4) Don Sutton, and 5) Jim Palmer.

Back on Opening Day of this year, it was 1) Skubal, 2) Zack Wheeler, 3) Paul Skenes, 4) Cristopher Sánchez, and 5) Sale, just a touch ahead of Yamamoto.

Misiorowski wasn’t rated higher at the time because of a relatively limited track record (66 innings of 4.36 ERA ball last year), and that’s why he’s not quite at the top yet, because we’re using a weighted average of the last 1,000 days. That means that even though 2026 information is the most important, there’s still a little value to knowing what happened over the previous two years as well. We expect that as time goes on, and each old day is replaced by a current day, Misiorowski will get to No. 1 sooner than later.

So, using this information, we can say NLCS Game 1 features the No. 1 pitcher in baseball (Skubal) vs. the No. 4 pitcher in baseball (Misiorowski), and that sure matches the eye test of “it doesn’t get a whole lot better than that, does it?”

Well: Does it?

There’s been nearly 1,500 postseason starts since 1971. Exactly 13 of them featured two top-four starters against one another, and that is essentially 1% of all games. One of them, we hadn’t realized at the time, came just last week, the first of its kind in six years. That was in the NL Division Series, when Sale faced Yamamoto in an excellent pitcher’s duel.

The full list of top-four matchups is limited, exclusive, and, we think, fantastic.

Postseason matchups between two top-four starters (since 1971)

That's it. That's all there is, before this one.

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Why the gap between 1991-2013? Well, there were close calls. In 2001, Randy Johnson faced Maddux for the only time in their postseason careers, but Maddux was just outside the top five at that point, as his best years were coming to an end. Maddux never faced Martinez or Clemens in the playoffs, and Johnson never faced Martinez, and while Martinez did face Clemens, never at a time where both were top-4. The closest in this span came in 2010, when fifth-ranked Tim Lincecum faced top-ranked Roy Halladay as well as second-ranked Cliff Lee. Close – but not quite enough.

If we take the average rank of the two starting pitchers, then the Skubal vs. Misiorowski matchup is going to be the third-best of those nearly 1,500 total games.

The best? It came in that NLCS Game 1 in 1986, a matchup between Gooden (first) and Scott (second), the only time we’ve had a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup. Gooden (1985) and Scott (1986) ended up winning back-to-back Cy Youngs, and the game itself was excellent, a 1-0 thriller in which Scott struck out 14 in a shutout.

Next best would be Game 4 of the 1990 ALCS, when Clemens (first) faced Stewart (third), though only Stewart held up his end of the bargain, throwing eight one-run innings while Clemens was ejected in the second inning for arguing the strike zone.

And third, tied with a few other 1-vs-4 or 2-vs-3 matchups? This one. Skubal. Misiorowski. If it feels like it doesn’t get much better than this, that’s because it hasn’t. It doesn’t. It almost really can’t.

If a rare matchup of 100-win teams in the NLCS isn’t good enough, if a rematch of last year’s NLCS – and the third time since 2018 – isn’t good enough, there’s this, too. You just don't really see starting pitching matchups like this, really ever. We're incredibly fortunate to get this one, potentially twice in the next week.

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