Mighty Brewers Lad Out-Duels Paul Skenes

I want Jacob Misiorowski's internet. This fresh-faced child gets wholesome baseball. "I feel like everything I swiped was me and Skenes, me and Skenes, me and Skenes," said Milwaukee's fire-breather of a rookie pitcher, of the days before his start Wednesday, the third of his career. "I had to mute it, turn it off." You dear sweet lad, whatever algorithm you're plugged into beats the hell out of mine: Everything I swiped was, well, the entire rest of reality, which sucks turbo ass. Imagine muting the only remotely bitchin' thing left in the universe: A mid-week duel of 23-year-old phenoms, featuring baseball's scariest pitcher versus some damn kid from out of nowhere who is somehow even scarier. Before last week I think I had never even heard of Jacob Misiorowski. Whitney Tilson? Israel Katz? Thomas Fugate? If I cannot plug into Misiorowski's web, the very next best thing would be someone splitting my head right down the middle with a wood ax.

For a dog-days rubber match in the dreaded NL Central, this Pirates-Brewers tilt was a pretty big deal. For one thing, all Paul Skenes starts are events, even if the sad-sack Pirates have gotten next to nothing this season from his brilliance. Skenes entered Wednesday's start one of just four qualified pitchers in baseball with an earned-run average below 2.00; he was also in the top five in innings pitched, WHIP, and fielding-independent pitching, and was best in baseball in pitching wins above replacement, per Baseball Reference. The other two starting pitchers in the majors who began Wednesday allowing fewer than two earned runs per nine innings have a combined record of 18–5. Skenes, meanwhile, was 4–7, and the Pirates had played to a morally unacceptable 8–8 record in his starts. It's an embarrassment, is what it is.

Misiorowski, meanwhile, had made two appearances for the Brewers, and they've been mighty ones. The towering righty was called up on June 12 from Triple-A Nashville to make his first major-league start, at home against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Brewers have an excellent rotation, but you simply cannot have too many shutdown pitchers, and Misiorowski has A Solid Gold Howitzer for a right arm. The Brewers were tempted to bring him up last season as a reliever, but manager Pat Murphy says the team was concerned that it would stunt his development as a starter, which the team views as his eventual best position. Misiorowski spent the first months of this season just absolutely terrorizing minor-league hitters, posting a 2.13 ERA and featuring a numero uno that would dent an Abrams tank. Back in May, during a start against the Cardinals' Triple-A affiliate, Misiorowski at one point hosed down an opposing hitter with six straight triple-digit fastballs, the last of which bruised his catcher's hand at an eye-popping 103 miles per hour.

There have been just 14 pitches thrown in the majors this season of at least 103 miles per hour, and precisely zero of them were thrown by a starting pitcher. The big-leaguers who hit 103 are closer-type freaks, the kinds of madmen whose eyes glow red, who fume in the bullpen at imagined slights, and whose arms are all but stored in gun safes. Misiorowski's rocket, meanwhile, came in his sixth inning of work, on the 78th pitch of the appearance. He then came back out to the mound a few minutes later and worked a clean seventh inning. It's unnatural! You do have to worry, if you are capable of empathy, about Misiorowski's long right arm separating at the elbow one of these nights and the disembodied chunk spinning off toward the backstop, trailing gore and meaty shrapnel. Those things do happen! But in the meantime, whew, the lad can chuck it with the best of them. Misiorowski's freakin' damn slider averages over 94 miles per hour, and touches 97. I repeat: This is not natural.

You can see why this was an intriguing matchup, between two pre-elbow-surgery starters capable of genuinely fucked-up and unprecedented power-pitching. Where Skenes is further along the ace track—I've lost count of how many wipeout pitches he now throws and if I look it up today I am just going to wind up feeling really bad about MacKenzie Gore—Misiorowski is still just a four-pitch lad. Those pitches are hellacious: Through the first two starts of his big-league career, Misiorowski had held opposing hitters to a welp-inspiring .030 batting average across 11 innings of work. It won't always be like this, surely, or we are all mega-screwed. The prospect-knowers over at MLB.com say that Misiorowski struggles to contort his 6-foot-7 frame into a repeatable up-tempo delivery, and that walks are sometimes an issue. Also, eventually professional hitters will figure out how not to look like complete goobers when they face him. But in the meantime, look out!

You would not expect the Pittsburgh Pirates to be the team to solve Misiorowski. I hate to spoil the tension of my own damn blog, but: They super extremely did not. Misiorowski pitched five innings Wednesday night, and was pretty close to flawless, notwithstanding a base-on-balls issued to Adam Frazier to begin his day. He scattered a couple lousy singles, the second of which was a disreputable infield hit; he issued a second walk, in the fourth inning; and he allowed a stolen base. He also struck out eight Pirates and threw a whopping 19 pitches that were clocked at 100 mph or faster, including consecutive 102-mph four-seamers to ring up Oneil Cruz in the fourth inning.

I take no pleasure whatsoever in reporting this, but Skenes couldn't keep up. He also issued a leadoff walk, but it was the second inning when his day went to shit. Isaac Collins walked, and then Bryce Turang, one of Milwaukee's several delightful Skittering Dudes, smacked a grounder directly behind Pittsburgh's shortstop, who'd pivoted toward second base with Collins on the move. Caleb Durbin then singled to load the bases. Collins subsequently made it home on a pathetic little dribbler of a groundout toward first, and the Brewers continued to nibble Skenes to death. Eric Haase lunged and poked a dying duck out to center, a 67-mph doink that dropped in front of Cruz and then squirted under his glove, plating Turang. Sal Frelick, another skitterer, chopped a 2–0 slider directly at drawn-in second baseman Nick Gonzalez, but Gonzalez's ill-advised throw home sailed hilariously, allowing Durbin to score. Jackson Chourio, also a little rascally underfoot sort of guy, finally produced a normal out, with a fly ball to center, but Christian Yelich followed with an extremely normal pro-grade single to left, driving home Haase.

By the time Skenes retired Rhys Hoskins a batter later, he'd thrown 37 pitches in the frame, and faced nine hitters. This was the first time since May 1 that Skenes had allowed more than two runs to score in any appearance, let alone an inning; it was also the most pitches he'd thrown and most hitters he'd faced in an inning in his career, per ESPN. Skenes has absolutely mastered the art of gritting his teeth while discussing profound professional frustration, a requisite of not dying of an aneurysm when you are a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates. "I wasn’t unhappy with the execution of all those," Skenes said, of his second-inning pitches. "There were a couple that could have been a little bit better, maybe there was a different pitch we could have thrown there, but they did a good job."

This was not quite a bummer, but it did sap a lot of the drama from the contest. Pirates manager Don Kelly confirmed after the game what was reported early in the SportsNet Pittsburgh broadcast, that Skenes will see his innings tightly managed for a while due to a hefty early-season workload. "Paul, he’s up over 100 [innings] now," Kelly explained. "Just really want to be mindful of where he’s at. There’s going to be days where he can run for a long time, and there’s other times that we’ve got to just take care of him, too, as far as him being our workhorse and understanding where he’s at."

So due to the shitty inning and to the Pirates wanting to protect Skenes's arm while also having very little honest competitive motivation for playing the remainder of their season, Skenes was yanked after the fourth inning, the first time this season and just the third so far in his career that he has failed to complete five innings of work. Pittsburgh's bullpen kept things reasonable but Milwaukee's finished Misiorowski's good work, and the Brewers collected the win. "It was exciting," said the pumped and cheesed youth. "It's awesome to face a guy like that and really compare yourself to some of the best." Misiorowski now owns a 1.13 ERA and a pristine 0.625 WHIP, and has earned a win in each of his three big-league starts.

These are two teams headed in opposite directions. The Brewers are climbing the standings: They're up to second in the NL Central, winners of seven of their last 10 games and with the division slowing around them. They've lost just two series since Misiorowski threw that 103-mph heater, back on May 15. Their excellent rotation just picked up an ace-level starter, and all it cost them was the moral compromise and eventual karmic wallop of dealing Aaron Civale to baseball hell. The Pirates, meanwhile and as usual, remain puke, 16 games out in their division and ahead of only the sickening Colorado Rockies in the National League standings. With Skenes seemingly subject to workload restrictions going forward, you are safe to return them once more to the "ignore" bin. For the time being, or until his arm violently kerplodes, consider Jacob Misiorowski to be a worthy diversion.