Perhaps mindful of PCA’s recent verbal, um, stumble, your Sun-Times correspondent tried to think of a polite way to ask Cubs manager Craig Counsell before his team’s 5-2 loss Tuesday about a visitor from Milwaukee whose fearsome reputation preceded him.
The name? Jacob Misiorowski.
“Do you regard Misiorowski as a bit of a—non-pejoratively—a freak in this game?’’ Counsell was asked.
“The pitcher, I think, by definition, the starting pitcher that throws the hardest in the game is going to be called that,’’ Counsell said.
“So I mean he’s throwing really hard and he’s throwing at velocities that we haven’t seen from the starting pitcher, especially recently.
“So yeah, when somebody’s doing something in the game that really hasn’t been done before…like, phone down.’’
Counsell’s contemplation of Misiorowski’s other-worldliness was briefly interrupted when one of his interrogators dropped her phone at his feet.
Let us enlighten you, before Counsell resumes his commentary, of what manner of pitcher we are talking about. Misiorowski is to pitch velocity what the autobahn is to highway driving.
He entered Tuesday night’s game averaging 99.6 miles an hour on his fastball. He would have cracked 100 except for one start early in April when he pitched with a queasy stomach. On that night, he averaged just 98 miles an hour.
In his last four starts entering Tuesday night, the average has spiked in each one to at least 100.5 miles an hour. Against the Yankees on May 8 in Yankee Stadium, he topped out at 103.6 mph and threw 22 other pitches that were 102 miles an hour or higher.
Consider this: Entering play Monday night, according to Mike Petriello, Misiorowski had thrown 233 pitches 100 m.p.h or faster. The other big-league starting pitchers combined have thrown 149.
Petriello is a highly regarded stats analyst for MLB.com. He is here to tell you that even though Statcast has only been measuring velocity since 2008, Petriello is here to tell you that no starter in baseball history has ever thrown harder.
Not Walter “Big Train” Johnson. Bullet Bob Feller. Sandy Koufax, The Ryan Express, Nolan Ryan. The Big Unit, Randy Johnson. Not even Satchel Paige, the legendary Negro Leagues pitcher whose fastball might have the best nickname of them all, Midnight Rider,
How can Petriello be so sure?
“Since 2008, there have been about 12.5 million regular season pitches,’’ he writes. “Before that? An untold number of millions upon millions of untracked pitches.
But if not knowable for sure, it’s a pretty easy thing to infer, too.
“The reason we can say that Misiorowski is almost certainly the hardest-throwing starter ever is because we’re now going on nearly two decades of reliably tracked, on-the-same-scale velocity that shows the velocity trend steadily increasing, and there’s no reason to think it was ever at a higher level in the decades before – when strikeouts were far, far lower.’’
As recently as 2010, the average fastball clocked at roughly 91 miles an hour. So while our eyes might tell us Sandy or Satch or the Unit were blowing away hitters at Misiorowski levels, the numbers are pretty convincing.
So what chance does a team have of hitting Misiorowski—and did we mention that he is 6-foot-7 with an arm extension that looks like he’s pitching from Little League distance?
Let us return to Counsell.
“Look, he’s got to throw balls in the strike zone, and there’s plenty of video where it’s getting hit,’’ Counsell said.
“You’ve got to do your best to get in a place that you can handle it…and you’ve got to execute on this pitches.’’
For the Cubs Tuesday night, it was more execution than execute. Misiorowski departed after six innings with a 3-0 lead, lighting up the scoreboard with triple digit readings, once on six consecutive pitches. He allowed three singles and a walk.
A freak show to remember.