Jacob Misiorowski is the hardest-throwing starting pitcher ever.
That’s not hype. That’s not a hot take.
Nor are the Miz’s velocity readings the product of a “hot gun.”
Misiorowski’s stunning sophomore campaign (MLB-best 1.50 ERA, 116 strikeouts and 0.81 WHIP, with an ERA+ that is 175% better than the league average) with the Brewers continues Friday night against the visiting Phillies. The 24-year-old’s intimidating stuff and numbers don’t match his picture. He’s lanky, baby-faced and so young and young at heart that he has a bathroom filled with Pokémon collectibles.
Still, he throws harder than Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson and, respectfully, all the other awesome starting arms of baseball past.
Saying the above might ruffle some feathers, not unlike when Misiorowski was named a 2025 National League All-Star replacement just five appearances into his MLB career.
But we can point out mathematical and evolutionary reality without knocking any of the all-time greats.
The names above were the hardest throwers of their time. But the Miz is the hardest-throwing starter of all-time. And watching him deploy his unmatched heat within an NL Cy Young race that is shaping up to be an all-timer all its own has been one of the most special subplots of the 2026 season.
First, let’s put what the Miz is doing in perspective.
He has the top 10 fastest pitches thrown by a starter in 2026. And the top 20. Top 30. Top 40. Top …
Well, let’s just lay out the numbers cleanly:
139
That’s how many spots are occupied by Misiorowski’s individual pitches on the 2026 starter velocity leaderboard before you get to a 101.5-mph heater thrown by the Pirates’ Jared Jones.
45
That’s how many pitches the Miz threw in his outing against the Rockies last Saturday that clocked 101 mph or more, a record in the pitch tracking era that dates back to 2008.
4
That’s the full length of the list of short-burst relievers averaging higher velo readings with their four-seamers than Misiorowski’s 100 mph mark. Relievers are maxing out, typically for only one inning, and only four of them -- the Padres’ Mason Miller, the Dodgers’ Edgardo Henriquez, the Phillies’ Jhoan Duran and the Giants’ Joel Peguero -- are routinely throwing harder than Misiorowski, who is averaging six innings per start.
26
That’s how many pitches of 100+ mph the Miz has thrown after the sixth inning, meaning he is holding absurd velocity levels deep into games.
There’s no one quite like him, now or ever.
But then again, someone like this was probably bound to come along, given the advancements made in athlete training and the baseball-wide obsession (yes, overly so) with velocity from early ages.
Again, it’s not a personal knock on the greats that came before to say that pitchers just didn’t throw as hard then as they do now.
There are voices out there arguing to the contrary. They say that, because of how velocity was measured with the more rudimentary radar devices that came about in the mid-1970s, pitchers from past eras are being short-changed on the velocity front.
These opinions pop up often on social media, so I’m not trying to single out former big leaguer John Vander Wal when I cite him here. But he recently articulated this concept.
“Velocity and spin rate didn’t magically explode,” Vander Wal posted on X. “The technology changed. The old JUGS guns read slower than Stalker. Stalker read differently than Stalker Pro. Then TrackMan started measuring velocity at or near release instead of farther down the ball’s flight. That ‘86 mph’ fastball from 30 years ago? In many cases it would show up in the low-to-mid 90s on today’s systems. MLB has spent years convincing fans that every pitcher today throws harder than previous generations. Some do. But a huge part of the jump is how the ball is measured.”
While it is certainly true that velocity is measured differently by Statcast (at the point of release) than it was by the old radar guns (closer to the plate, after the ball had met air resistance), it is false to say that pitchers aren’t throwing any harder now than they did before.
This hilarious post of a velocity graph from Driveline director of baseball operations Jack Lambert sums this up better than any paragraph can:
If for some reason you don’t trust the data coming from Doppler radar -- data that has been consistently measured from the pitcher’s hand going back to 2008 -- then just listen to some elite hitters of the pitch tracking era who observed the changes first-hand.
J.D. Martinez (to NBC Sports Boston in 2021): “When I was coming up there was one guy in the league that threw 100 and it was [Aroldis] Chapman. Now there are two guys on every team that throw 100.”
Aaron Judge (to MLB.com in 2022): “Before, the sinker used to be guys throwing 90, 91 mph, and now you've got guys throwing 100.”
Andrew McCutchen (to the Baseball Isn’t Boring podcast in 2024): “It's different now. When I came up, if a guy threw 95, you were like, 'Whoa, this guy's throwing hard.' Now, if a guy's throwing 95, it's like, 'Alright, what else you got?' Everyone is throwing 98-100 now. It's a completely different game."
Pitchers are throwing harder than ever. It’s both entertaining and concerning, because of the effects on the injury rate and how starters are deployed. But you can’t deny it.
And within this context, we have Misiorowski, the greatest representative yet of how far we’ve come on the velocity front.
It’s actually unfair to focus so much on the Miz’s raw heat without delving into all the ways he’s made himself a premier pitcher. Four years ago, he was coming out of junior college. He fell to the Brewers in the second round because of concerns about his command, and those concerns cropped up anew last season, when he burst onto the big league scene but battled fatigue and injury in the second half and finished with a below-average ERA+.
This year? Fewer Miz-takes.
The 6-foot-7 Misiorowski has learned to keep his elite 7 ½-foot extension from causing his landing foot to drift and his arm to lag. He’s corralling his velocity early in games so that he has something left in the tank late. He’s tightened up his lower half, with a more repeatable delivery that has led to a reduction in walk rate from 11% to 7.3%.
He’s no longer a curiosity, and there’s no longer a debate about whether he deserves to be an All-Star. Misiorowski spent the month of May striking out 57, walking only six and allowing just one run and one extra-base hit. He’s a stone-cold stud.
But yes, the velo is the headline here and elsewhere, because we as a baseball community have long been obsessed with tabulating it.
Walter Johnson, “The Big Train,” went to the Bridgeport Ordnance Proving Grounds to throw a fastball through a series of copper sheets connected to a device used to measure artillery shells back in 1917.
“Rapid Robert” Feller had his fastball measured against the speed of a passing police motorcycle in a 1939 stunt.
“The Ryan Express” was the focal point of a 1974 “Guess the Velo” promotion at Angel Stadium in which a ninth-inning fastball was clocked at 100.8 mph. The documentary “Fastball” makes the claim that the pitch would be measured at 108 mph today if the calculation was made out of the hand, but the whole thing is dubious given that Ryan was never again clocked at 100 by the JUGS guns that became popular the next year, the Rockwell Technologies radar used that night was never used in MLB again and did I mention the whole thing was a promotion?
All we have is the data we have, and the data we have says that Misiorowski is a freak of nature even within the ever-rising velo standards of the day.
Nobody beats the Miz.