Seeing what Jacob Misiorowski looks like on the mound this season, it's funny to think back about how he was an All-Star last year, too. Because the 2026 All-Star Misiorowski is in a completely different class than the 2025 All-Star Misiorowski.
The Miz just had one of the most sheerly overpowering first halves of baseball that we've seen in a long time. And if his second half looks anything like the first half, he's not just going to be "All-Star Jacob Misiorowski," he's going to be "Cy Young Jacob Misiorowski."
Misiorowski has the best stuff in the Majors. He's inducing the highest whiff rate, 38%, of any starter. He has the highest strikeout rate, 39%. He leads the Majors with 173 total K's.
But we're not comparing Misiorowski to the rest of the league right now. We're comparing 2025 Miz vs. 2026 Miz.
Last season, Misiorowski was a triple-digit-throwing phenom, too, but he wasn't this. He made the All-Star Game after just five MLB starts. He was an All-Star because he was electrically talented, not because he was great. Now he is great. He's a more dominant pitcher by every measure, but especially by the big, bat-missing measures.
- Strikeout rate: 32% ➡️ 39%
- Swing-and-miss rate: 30% ➡️ 38%
And count this as one more point toward Misiorowski's skyrocketing nasty factor: He's not just missing more bats, he's missing bats by more.
Thanks to our new swing timing and miss distance data on Baseball Savant, we can see exactly how Misiorowski is inducing uglier swings than before.
We want to start with Misiorowski's fastball, because, well, when a guy throws 105 mph, you start with the fastball. The heater is the pitch that's unlocking the big misses for Misiorowski. But maybe not in the way that you'd think.
If you've seen, well, any Misiorowski highlights at all this season, you know he's throwing his fastball very, very hard, even compared to last year:
- Avg. fastball velocity: 99.3 mph ➡️ 100.5 mph
- Max fastball velocity: 102.6 mph ➡️ 105.5 mph
- % of fastballs thrown 100+ mph: 33% ➡️ 64%
That very fast fastball makes plenty of hitters miss. But it's not what makes them miss by a mile. Misiorowski blows them away with it, sure. But a more explosive fastball isn't actually causing hitters to whiff by any wider of a margin.
The average miss distance against Misiorowski's four-seamer is the same this season, 1.3 inches, as it was in 2025. (That's measuring how far the barrel of the bat is from the baseball on swings-and-misses.) At the end of the day, hitters just don't miss fastballs by all that much, even 100-plus mph fastballs.
That's not to say the swings against Misiorowski's fastball are good. They are bad. He's getting a massive 42% whiff rate with his four-seamer. Hitters swing underneath it close to two thirds of the time, which is a lot. They're also late against it more often this season, which makes sense, since it's a faster fastball.
And the frequency of "flawed swings" against Misiorowski's four-seamer -- essentially, completely empty swings, where the hitter is not on time, the bat is not on plane with the pitch, and the ball is not centered on the barrel -- is among the highest in the Majors.
But the real impact of all those triple-digit heaters on hitters' timing comes when Misiorowski throws his other pitches. Miz's fastball is unlocking big whiffs, just not by itself. It's unlocking big whiffs from the rest of his repertoire.
Look at Misiorowski's breaking balls. Not only are the whiff rates on his slider and curveball way up this year -- the whiff distances are way up, too.
Miss distance vs. Misiorowski's breaking pitches, 2025 ➡️ 2026
- Slider: 1.7 inches ➡️ 4.4 inches*
- Curveball: 4.3 inches ➡️ 5.6 inches
*Misiorowski's harder cutter (96.0 mph), which he's split off from his "slower" slider (92.2 mph) this season, is also generating a healthy miss distance of 3.2 inches.
Fastballs might not produce huge misses even when they're elite, but with breaking balls, bigger miss distances are a pretty good sign that you have a nasty pitch in your arsenal. And hitters aren't coming close to Miz's breakers.
It's not even just that they're whiffing by a much wider margin. Their timing is completely off. The flawed swing rate against Misiorowski's slider, cutter and curveball has more than doubled from last season to this season.
And it's because those hitters have to sell out to try to hit his fastball.
Misiorowski is letting his fastball eat. He's throwing it 63% of the time this season, a big jump from 2025 (55%). No starter throws a single type of fastball more than Miz throws his four-seamer.
And when a pitcher is bombarding you with 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105 mph heaters -- dozens of them per game -- it's all you can do to try to be ready for that one pitch. You can't possibly also be ready for the 96 mph cutter and the 92 mph slider and the 88 mph curve.
Misiorowski's four-seamer is the most swung-at pitch in baseball. By a fairly wide margin, too. There have been well over 500 hacks against it. Hitters are doing all they can just to put their bat on his heater (they still have trouble doing it), and that means they give up some very bad swings against his secondaries.
Hitters are swinging over the top of Misiorowski's slider and curveball much more often (31% of the time, up from 22% in 2025). They're flailing at sliders and curves off the end of their barrel much more often (also 31% of the time, vs. 26% in 2025). And they're swinging too early against both breaking pitches more often (22% of the time, vs. 17% in 2025).
In other words: Hitters' timing against Miz's breaking balls has gotten worse in every way. Those mis-timed swings are a direct product of them being forced to gear up for a 100.5 mph fastball that comes on two out of every three pitches. Then it's the third pitch, the one that's not a four-seamer, that really gets them waving.
These are the results of those empty swings:
BA / SLG vs. Misiorowski's secondary pitches
- Curveball: .113 BA / .113 SLG (.231 / .385 in 2025)
- Slider: .173 BA / .327 SLG (.293 / .594 in 2025)
- Cutter: .085 BA / .203 SLG (didn't throw distinct cutter in 2025)
When Misiorowski's fastball was just a tiny bit less explosive, it trickled down to his breaking balls. They missed bats by less, and they got worse results. Now everything is ripping, and you get a Cy Young-level pitcher who can wipe you out with anything.