This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.
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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Nobody Touches The Miz
Vol. 18, No. 45
June 13, 2026
A few weeks back, I did a riff on signature significance in a Lifetime piece:
Does one incredible performance carry so much meaning it can change your view of the player? What [Reid] Detmers did last night is more common than it was for most of baseball history -- twice this year, 17 times this decade, 73 this century...after just 54 occurrences prior to 2001. More teams, more games, and many more strikeouts.
Does it have signature significance any more? Emerson Hancock did in earlier this month. Triston McKenzie did it once, Andrew Heaney, Dan Straily, Brad Penny. It’s not unheard of for a good pitcher at his peak to have a day like this. Work your way down the list, though, and there are a lot of bold-faced names. deGrom, Cole, Strasburg, Scherzer, Verlander. Even the next tier down is Burnes, Bieber, Glasnow, Sale. Sandy Alcantara and Spencer Strider and Walker Buehler all did it at their peaks.
Raising the bar to 15 strikeouts clears a lot of chaff -- 56 occurrences and a lot of bronze, but still...Chris Archer, Michael Pineda, Sterling Hitchcock. Draw the line at 16, and it’s mostly guys you’ve heard of...and Vince Velasquez, somehow. So Velasquez notwithstanding, I think a start of 16 strikeouts with no walks is where we draw the line for signature significance. If I know nothing other than that about you, I can probably surmise you are a great pitcher.
Maybe 15 isn’t such a bad number after all. Maybe “15 strikeouts, no walks” has signature significance when you pair it with numbers like “104.5” -- the fastest pitch ever recorded by a starter --- and “95” -- the number of pitches thrown. Maybe what Jacob Misiorowski did last night, erasing the Phillies from the map, stands on its own as an indication of true greatness. But for a Kyle Schwarber first-pitch line-drive single in the fourth, we could be talking today about the greatest pitching performance ever.
As is stands, it’s in the picture. Game Score, a Bill James invention, grades a pitcher’s start based on the box-score line.
Best Ever? (Highest Game Score, nine innings or fewer)
Kerry Wood CHC 5/6/98 105
Max Scherzer WAS 10/3/15 104
Clayton Kershaw LAD 6/18/14 102
Matt Cain SFG 6/13/12 101
Sandy Koufax LAD 9/9/65 101
Nap Rucker BRO 9/5/08* 101
Nolan Ryan TEX 5/1/91 101
Ten tied with 100
*1908
(The “nine innings” restriction is necessary because the highest Game Scores all come from a time when starters were allowed to pitch forever. Sixty-two pitchers have a Game Score of at least 106, seven hit 120, the record is 153.)
Misiorowski’s Game Score of 100 is tied for the eighth-highest of all time. You know most of the others. Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game, perfectos by Matt Cain and Sandy Koufax, the last no-hitter Nolan Ryan ever threw. Old friend Marty Lurie might have been at that Nap Rucker game, I’ll have to check.
I’m not sure this list gets at what Misiorowski did last night. There was a ruthlessness to him that called to mind the way Pedro Martinez wiped out lineups at his peak. He struck out the side in the first on 13 pitches, 11 of them four-seam fastballs, none of them at less than 102 mph. Sit with that for a second. There was a time, in the life of this Newsletter, that a 102-mph fastball would have caused us to gasp, to yelp, to post, even. Last night, it was Misiorowski’s let-up pitch. He walked off the mound after one inning, and watching him you had that sense, deep in your baseball brain, that this wasn’t going to be an ordinary night.
It was not. Misiorowski would throw 69 four-seam fastballs, and every single one was tracked at at least 100 mph. He averaged 102.6 mph on his fastball in the ninth inning, which would get our attention if it were Mason Miller or Aroldis Chapman...except Misiorowski started the ninth at 86 pitches rather than zero. On this night, Misiorowski was his own fire-breathing closer. His final pitch of the game, his 95th, was a 103-mph fastball. I can hardly believe my own words. It sounds like I’m trying to slip Sidd Finch 2.0 past you, maybe pitching a Netflix series about Henry Rowengartner’s grandson.
Misiorowski, though, is real. He leads MLB in ERA and FIP and strikeouts. After last night, he has one of the league’s five shutouts and its eight complete games. Batters are hitting .140/.216/.194 against him. The record for lowest batting average allowed in a season of at least 100 innings pitched is .165, set by Misiorowski’s former teammate, Freddy Peralta, in 2021. The record for a qualified starter is .167, set by Pedro Martinez in 2000. Batters will have to hit about .200 off Misiorowski the rest of the way to push him over that figure, and that just doesn’t seem possible.
I want to see how the Brewers handle Misiorowski the rest of the way. They’ve been pretty conservative with all their starters in the David Stearns/Matt Arnold era. Misiorowski threw 97 innings in 2024, 141 last year, and my working assumption has been that they would aim for 170 or so this year, which would leave about 85 innings left. The Brewers, though, plan to play for seven months, not six, so they need to be thinking about October already. That 170 is my projection, not theirs, but I just don’t think they’ll want him heading towards and past 200 innings during a playoff run. It’s why, talking to Gill Alexander on VSIN, I said I thought Cristopher Sanchez should be a bigger favorite for the NL Cy Young Award, as he’s just more likely to stay in the rotation all season than Misiorowski or Chase Burns is.
Misiorowski is tempering some of those concerns with his efficiency. He’s cut his walk rate from 11% to 7%, and as we saw last night, has learned he can pour his fastball into the zone without much fear. Just three pitchers have thrown their fastball in the strike zone more than Misiorowski has, and when he does, batters hit .172 and slug .228. Among qualified starters, Misiorowski is eighth in pitches per inning pitched, one of a dozen under 15 P/IP.
Velocity. Control. Efficiency. Unhittability. It all came together on a Friday night in Milwaukee. Jacob Misiorowski gave us a night to remember. I can’t wait to see him do it again.
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