Baseball has seen flame-throwing relievers touch triple digits for an inning at a time. What it hasn't seen is a starting pitcher doing it on a nightly basis for six-plus frames. That's the gap Jacob Misiorowski is closing, and the numbers guys can barely keep the graphics updated.
Most 101+ MPH Pitches In An MLB Season (the entire pitch tracking era): Jacob Misiorowski (2026), 451 *⃣ Aroldis Chapman (2016), 424 Jordan Hicks (2018), 382 Jhoan Duran (2023), 370 Aroldis Chapman (2014), 330 *⃣ - through July 7 🤯
That's not a cherry-picked stat. It's the entire pitch-tracking era, meaning every Aroldis Chapman heater and every Jordan Hicks sinker from the last decade-plus is now looking up at a starting pitcher. Misiorowski's 2022 draft profile out of Crowder College always came with the disclaimer 'huge arm, needs to harness it.' Nobody wrote 'will eventually throw harder than prime Chapman for six innings a start.'
The stuff shows up pitch by pitch, not just in the season-long leaderboards. PitchingNinja's daily reel from his latest start had the fastball readings climbing as the game went on.
Back-to-back readings of 104 mph and 103 mph, clocked in the same outing.
104 is absurd for anyone. It's stranger still coming from a guy who was sitting comfortably in the high 90s a year ago. Side-by-side freeze frames comparing this year's delivery to last year's look at Busch Stadium show the difference isn't magic, it's mechanics and strength.
A frame-by-frame comparison of Misiorowski's posture and lower half from last season versus this one.
The velocity spike hasn't come at the expense of results, either. The strikeouts are piling up alongside the radar readings, and the swing-and-miss stuff extends well past the fastball. That back-foot curveball he buried against a right-hander wasn't a show-off pitch, it was an out pitch, and the 94 mph slider a few innings later did the same job from a completely different shape.
A 94 mph slider that got Misiorowski to his 9th strikeout through 6 innings.
It's easy to write off a guy who just throws hard as a one-trick command project, and that was the knock on him coming up. But a rookie season that included an 11-inning no-hit start to his career and a fast-tracked All-Star nod last summer suggested this wasn't just radar-gun theater. This year the ERA and whiff rates back it up, and CodifyBaseball's other tracker shows he's lapping the field on pure quantity of premium heat, not just the occasional radar-gun outlier.
None of this is likely to slow down. Misiorowski is still adding strength, per his own admission after setting new velocity marks, and the Brewers have every incentive to keep running him out there every 5th day rather than manage his workload like a September call-up. The question now isn't whether he can hold this pace, it's how much higher the ceiling actually goes, because right now nobody in the sport, past or present, has been able to answer that for him.