Ears still burning from all the insults exchanged at Rate Field last weekend, a Sun-Times correspondent tried Tuesday to think of a polite way to ask Cubs manager Craig Counsell about a visitor from Milwaukee whose fearsome reputation preceded him.
Most fans caught a glimpse of Brewers pitcher Jacob Misiorowski last season, when Major League Baseball named him to the National League All-Star team even though he had made just five starts, winning four of them in overpowering fashion. You can’t miss him. He stands 6-7, with an arm extension that suggests he could tickle a hitter’s chin while blowing fastballs by him.
Fans saw him again in the playoffs, when he came out of the bullpen twice for victories against the Cubs.
But this version rampaging through the big leagues this season, throwing pitches at a speed and a frequency never witnessed before? What should we call him?
“Do you regard Misiorowski as a bit of a — non-pejoratively — a freak in this game?” the correspondent asked.
Answered Counsell: “I think, by definition, the starting pitcher that throws the hardest in the game is going to be called that. 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 otherworldliness was briefly interrupted when another reporter dropped her phone at his feet.
Some enlightment before Counsell resumes his commentary: Misiorowski is to pitch velocity what the autobahn is to highway driving. He entered Tuesday night’s game at Wrigley Field averaging 99.6 mph on his fastball. He would have cracked 100 if not for one start in early April in which he pitched with a queasy stomach. That night, he averaged just 98 mph.
Against the Yankees on May 8 at Yankee Stadium, he topped out at 103.6 mph and threw 22 other pitches of 102 or higher.
Consider this: Stats analyst Mike Petriello of MLB.com said Misiorowski had thrown 233 pitches of 100 mph or faster entering play Tuesday. The other major-league starting pitchers combined had thrown 149.
After the Brewers’ 5-2 win over the Cubs, which vaulted them into first place in the NL Central for the first time in six weeks — April 10, to be exact — you can add another 15 triple-digit offerings to Misiorowski’s list. According to Baseball Savant, his first six pitches to Nico Hoerner clocked at 101.1, 101.2, 100.2, 100.3, 100.2 and 100.9.
Hoerner walked. The Cubs didn’t get a hit until Seiya Suzuki’s two-out single in the fourth inning. Dansby Swanson singled in the fifth. Hoerner hit a dribbler in front of the plate for another single in the sixth.
That was the sum total of the offense against Misiorowki (4-2), who was dismissed with a 3-0 lead after six innings with eight more strikeouts under his belt.
According to OptaStats, he’s the first pitcher since 1901 to have a stretch of four starts with 30-plus strikeouts, no runs allowed and no extra-base hits allowed.
Even though Statcast has only measured velocity since 2008, Petriello says no starter in baseball history has ever thrown harder. Not Walter “Big Train” Johnson, not “Bullet” Bob Feller, not Sandy Koufax, not Nolan Ryan, not Randy Johnson, not Satchel Paige.
How can Petriello be so sure?
“The reason we can say that Misiorowski is almost certainly the hardest-throwing starter ever,” he wrote, “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.”
So what chance does a team have of hitting Misiorowski?
For the Cubs on this night, it was more execution than execute.