You can throw a no-hitter or perfect game and not be as utterly overwhelming as Brewers ace Jacob Misiorowski was against the Phillies on Friday night.
Yes, the Miz gave up a fourth-inning single to Kyle Schwarber. And as singles go, it was a no-doubter, a flare to the center-field grass that was in no danger of being caught. It was clean enough and early enough that the remainder of Misiorowski’s outing was not pitched with the weight of historical importance bearing down upon him.
But the Miz nevertheless made his own kind of history, with an outing that demonstrates dominance in its purest form.
To wit…
- He threw a shutout in which he faced the minimum (Schwarber was erased by an inning-ending double play).
- He threw 95 pitches, 74 of which were strikes and 25 of which resulted in swings and misses. The Phillies whiffed on 57% of their 40 swings against his four-seam fastball.
- He struck out 15 -- the most ever in a “Maddux” (a complete-game shutout of less than 100 pitches).
- He did not have a three-ball count, and he only had five two-ball counts.
- He set a new record for a starter (as far as we know in the pitch-tracking era dating back to 2008) with a 104.5 mph fastball to strike out Schwarber in the first and still cranked it up to 103.1 with a strikeout of Justin Crawford in the ninth.
- He did this in the midst of a stretch of eight starts in which his ERA has been 0.17, he's struck out 80 and allowed just a single extra-base hit.
- His game score was 100, marking just the 10th time a pitcher has reached that mark in an outing this century, including:
1) Max Scherzer, 104 game score vs. the Mets, Oct. 3, 2015
2) Clayton Kershaw, 102 vs. the Rockies, June 18, 2014
3) Matt Cain, 101 vs. the Astros, June 13, 2012
4) Gerrit Cole, 100 vs. the D-backs, May 4, 2018
5) Randy Johnson, 100 vs. the Braves, May 18, 2004
6) Jacob Misiorowski, 100 vs. the Phillies, June 12, 2026
7) Brandon Morrow vs. 100 vs. the Rays, Aug. 8, 2010
8) Max Scherzer, 100 vs. the Brewers, June 14, 2015
9) Curt Schilling, 100 vs. the Brewers, April 7, 2002
10) Justin Verlander vs. the Blue Jays, Sept. 1, 2019
On the one-year anniversary of his MLB debut, Misiorowski put together a performance that was old-school in its length and efficiency and state-of-the-art in terms of its outlandish, overpowering velocity.
I don’t mean to do the baseball columnist thing where I make this about myself, but I was thinking the other day about how I’ve been both fortunate to see a fair amount of no-hitters in my line of work and laughably unlucky in that none of them rise of the level of the greatest of the great.
My first “no-hitter” was the perfect game that wasn’t. I was there when Jim Joyce’s errant call at first base cost the Tigers’ Armando Galarraga a perfecto against Cleveland in 2010. I like to call it the only “28-out perfect game” in history (to his credit, Galarraga calmly retired the next batter), but unfortunately, it doesn’t go down in the books that way.
My first official no-hitter was Ervin Santana’s in Cleveland the very next season, but that was one of the 25 in which the opposing team scored a run (in this case, with the help of a first-inning error) while being no-hit.
I was there for two combined no-hitters. Corbin Burnes was pulled after eight innings in Cleveland (can you tell I live in Cleveland?) in 2021 because of his pitch count, and the Astros used four pitchers to no-hit the Phillies in Game 4 of the 2022 World Series. Combined no-hitters count, but, well, don’t make me state the obvious. We’d all prefer to see one guy go the distance.
The point of this personal digression is that there is nuance to the no-no. No-hitters get the bigger headlines and the entry on the Wikipedia page, but they are not necessarily as entrancing or as impressive as what Misiorowski just did.
Misiorowki is the subject of our latest episode of “Going Deep” on YouTube, in which we make the case that, with all due respect to MLB’s sacred cows, he is the hardest-throwing starting pitcher ever. But as that piece points out, there is so much more to this kid than throwing hard. He’s throwing with conviction, he’s maintaining both his velocity and mechanics deep into games and he is charting a path to prominence through dominance by making even the best batters in baseball look foolish and clueless against him.
A year ago, the Miz (it’s always nice when an ace has a catchy nickname) debuted and captivated our imaginations with his raw stuff before fatiguing and fading a bit in the second half. This season, he’s made the necessary adjustments to get max potential out of that max velocity. This 24-year-old is a stunningly quick study.
Misiorowski’s pure velocity is the model of modern pitching. It’s a world that, painfully, has its faults. Kids are throwing too hard, too young, because they know that’s their ticket to being seen and selected. The injury rate is out of control, and the max-effort mindset has made the game more bullpen-oriented than it was designed to be. You want to point to the Miz and say, “Don’t try this at home, kids.” But given what is rewarded at both the amateur and professional levels, you can understand why so many kids are trying this at home.
But velocity alone doesn’t get you an outing like the Miz just had or a career like the one he appears to be coursing toward. Yes, he can hit 104.5 and get one of the greatest hitters in the sport to swing through it. But he’s learned to corral and command that heat, to fill the zone, to stay in control of himself, his delivery and his opponent. And what we just witnessed was the strongest sum yet of those powers. Misiorowski’s not just out there slinging heat and hoping for the best. He’s pitching in a way few in history have.
And let the record show that this was about as dominant as a pitcher can be, regardless of that Schwarber single.