The Brewers took a flamethrower to the mound against the Mets on July 20, and by the time the first inning was over, Juan Soto looked like he'd aged five years. Misiorowski came into the start already having one of the best rookie seasons in recent memory — 10-4 with a 1.62 ERA and 167 strikeouts in just 111.2 innings, per FanDuel's pregame research. Soto, the $765 million offseason answer to every pitching problem in Queens, was supposed to be the one lineup entry that could actually square him up.
PitchingNinja tracked the exact readings as Misiorowski attacked Soto with triple-digit gas.
103. 104. 104 again. That's not a bullpen session, that's a first-inning at-bat against arguably the best pure hitter alive. Codify Baseball crunched the numbers and found that all four pitches Misiorowski threw Soto in the frame were the fastest four pitches Soto has ever faced in his career — not just this season, ever. When a 27-year-old former batting champ with elite plate discipline is facing pitches he's mechanically never had to process before, that's not a bad matchup, that's uncharted territory.
This wasn't a one-batter fluke, either. Misiorowski opened the game by burying strikeout number 3 of the first inning on a 103 mph fastball painted on the black, the kind of pitch location that shouldn't even be possible at that velocity.
The third strikeout of the first inning came on a 103 mph fastball right on the corner.
Codify's tracking-era research puts the whole outing in context, and it's absurd: the six pitchers in MLB history who've thrown 10-plus pitches at 102-plus mph in a single first inning are all the same guy. Misiorowski now owns that list outright, and Monday's 11 triple-digit pitches in the opening frame slots in as the second-most in the pitch-tracking era — trailing only his own record. He's not just fast, he's rewriting what a first inning is allowed to look like, start after start.
Codify's tracking-era leaderboard for 102+ mph pitches in a first inning — it's just Misiorowski, over and over.
Most 102+ MPH Pitches Thrown In The First Inning Of An MLB Game (Entire Pitch Tracking Era): Misiorowski, 12 Misiorowski, 11 (tonight) Misiorowski, 10 Misiorowski, 10 Misiorowski, 10 Misiorowski, 10 Misiorowski, 9 Misiorowski, 6 Jordan Hicks, 6 Misiorowski, 5 Misiorowski, 5
None of this happened overnight. Misiorowski fell to the Brewers in the second round of the 2022 draft out of tiny Crowder College, with scouts flagging command issues even though his fastball already sat 94-96 mph. He was sitting 98 in Triple-A last year and jumped to a 99.3 mph average four-seamer as a rookie. This season he's up to 101.1 mph on average, and last month he broke his own tracking-era record for hardest pitch by a starter with a 105.5 mph heater against the Cubs. The trajectory has been almost vertical, and Monday against Soto was just the latest data point.
He didn't only bury Soto with heat — he mixed in a cutter that looked just as nasty coming out of the same slot, which is the part that should scare the rest of the league. A pitcher who can run it up to 104 and still land a upper-90s cutter for a swinging strikeout isn't a one-trick prospect anymore, he's a problem for every scouting report in baseball.
The 98 mph cutter that gave hitters a second weapon to worry about, not just the fastball.
The sportsbooks have already caught on — PitchingNinja's pregame pick had Misiorowski going over 9 strikeouts, and outings like this are exactly why his prop lines keep climbing every fifth day. He wound up striking out 6 and left after four innings, but the box score undersells what actually happened in that first frame: a hitter as good as Soto got a live look at pitches nobody in the sport had ever thrown him, and it wasn't close. If this is the version of Misiorowski the league gets from here on out, the strikeout props are only going one direction.