Jacob Misiorowski is having among the most dominant pitching seasons we’ve ever seen. What does he need to do to get it up there with the all-time greats?
In a recent piece I did about the greatest single season pitching seasons, I quickly mentioned in the intro that Misiorowski was on pace for an all-time season if he kept up his current pace before launching into verbose soliloquies about 2018 Jacob deGrom and 1985 Dwight Gooden. But the blueprint was there; if we have some sense of what makes the best pitching seasons, surely we can get The Miz to that level.
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Two factors consistently colored my ranking: dominance relative to other pitchers in the same time (why steroid-era Pedro Martinez in 1999-2000 was the greatest pitcher ever) and statistical outliers extended over a full season. Misiorowski needs a true mathematical trump card that will be visible and obvious to everyone for the rest of time. For Misiorowski, that’s currently his ERA: 1.45, the best ever save for 1968 Bob Gibson (number three on my other list) and his patently absurd 1.12 ERA in over 300 innings pitched. That figure is so good it needs additional context, namely that the strike zone was much larger than it is today in 1968, and Gibson’s dominance — along with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale — led to rule changes that fixed that. Misiorowski would, for all intents and purposes, pass 1985 Dwight Gooden for the best non-“juiced zone” ERA ever.*
(*whenever I say “ever” in this piece, I generally mean since 1945, since I think post-World War II is a good starting point for pitching legacy conversations given many players returned from military service, integration began soon after and pitchers stopped pitching 19 billion innings per year. It just wasn’t the same sport for pitchers before.)
But ERA is a flawed statistic, and not necessarily great at capturing true pitcher performance. I also like ERA estimators like FIP and SIERA, basically ERA-scale stats that try to correct for things pitchers can’t control like defense and balls in play. I only have SIERA data going back to 2002, but Misiorowski would be third all-time in the SIERA club behind 2014 Clayton Kershaw (fourth on my list) and 2002 Curt Schilling (by .01). As for FIP, or fielding independent pitching, good at telling you which pitchers prevent runs by themselves rather than with defensive help, Misiorowski is in hallowed ground. Since 1945, he trails only 2021 Corbin Burnes (FIP god for some reason) and 1999 Pedro Martinez — number one on my list and the undisputed king of pitching seasons.
You may be thinking “what do I care about FIP? I’ve never even heard of that until now!” But I assure you, FIP is a powerful thing, and Misiorowski being a FIP and ERA god is good for other historical markers, namely Wins Above Replacement (WAR), calculated by two websites differently. “bWAR” from Baseball-References relies more on runs allowed, while “fWAR” from FanGraphs is FIP-based. Misiorowski is insane at both, meaning if he keeps this up, his WAR number could go down as an all-timer — he’s already on pace for about 10 WAR right now, a bonkers achievement for a starting pitcher in the age of the reliever.
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But Misiorowski’s greatness goes beyond this numerical soups I’ve just concocted. He’s also super cool because he throws super hard and refuses to throw slower. He threw 47 pitches above 101 mph in a loss to Atlanta, which is the record for a starter. He threw a pitch to strikeout Kyle Schwarber that clocked in at 105 mph, the fastest ever from a starter. In 2026, he ratcheted up his four-seam fastball usage up almost 10 percent from 2025 to a ridiculous 64 percent, the highest in the majors by a lot and the second highest in the Statcast era (since 2015) behind only 2017 Kevin Gausman. MLB has moved away from a lot of fastballs and towards fewer-but-better fastballs, but Misiorowski pulled up to the club and said “nah, I’ll just throw more, better fastballs.”
And why not? Using Baseball Savant’s glorious new swing timing + miss distance data, we can see that 2026 Jacob Misiorowski’s fastball is among the most unhittable pitches since they started tracking in 2023. I would go so far as to say it is the single least hittable pitch since it is a fastball producing a 44 percent whiff rate. That is not something you are supposed to be able to do, and Misiorowski’s fastball is straight-up the best swing-and-miss fastball in the Majors since at least 2023 (probably longer) among both starters and relievers.
I don’t know if my profuse use of italics is underscoring how impossibly impossible it is that Misiorowski is putting up these kinds of numbers, but even if you don’t like numbers, we also have historical intrigue: Misiorowski is on pace for one of the greatest seasons ever, but he’s actually not the most on pace anyone has ever been.
That title goes to 2021 Jacob deGrom, who was, if you can believe it, a wildly superior version of 2026 Misiorowski through basically the exact same number of innings pitched. He has a 1.08 ERA (would be the best ever) a 1.24 FIP (would be the best ever) and struck out 14.28 per nine innings (would be the best ever). And that’s where it stands today; deGrom got injured and missed the rest of the season, meaning he pitched by far the greatest half-season ever. This is what Misiorowski needs to avoid.
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He throws hard, we all know that, and while it’s commonly debated whether velocity is the real culprit for UCL injuries and tears, it’s obviously a concern that Misiorowski may not be able to sustain this pitching output that’s like he’s the Winter Soldier with a vibranium arm. But I don’t speculate about injuries; I speculate if this is sustainable for the rest of the season.
Looking at expected statistics, Misiorowski is overperforming based on his contact quality, but so is every pitcher who’s ever had a great season in the history of ever. And he’s not actually overperforming by that much — most of his expected numbers are within small enough margins not to take much stock in them, and the discrepancy is mostly because it is not supposed to be possible to create this kind of swing-and-miss with a fastball as a starter. It’s legitimately unprecedented stuff.
Maybe that will regress, and maybe Misiorowski will start getting barreled later in the year. But I could see a world where we look back on 2026 Misiorowski and think of one of the greatest pitching seasons in the history of baseball. So I suggest we all drink it in while we’ve got it.
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