It’s not just triple-digit velocity. Jacob Misiorowski might be throwing the best fastball in baseball history

We can say it now: Jacob Misiorowski is probably going to win the NL Cy Young Award this year, barring an injury or “Space Jam”-esque draining of talent. Anyone who looks at the stats can tell you that. Anyone who looks at the odds in Vegas can tell you that. And anyone who watched the Milwaukee Brewers ace’s latest start can probably tell you that.

Misiorowski’s 12-strikeout performance against the Colorado Rockies in Milwaukee is best described as one-half of the greatest start in MLB history. He struck out the first seven batters he faced and retired every batter until there were two outs in the fifth inning, at which point Cole Carrigg ended the perfect game and shutout bid with a home run. Chad Patrick was on the mound for Milwaukee when the sixth inning began.

Obviously, it’s easier to dominate for four-and-a-half innings than nine innings, but the thing is, Misiorowski has already done the latter this season, too. Facing one of MLB’s better offenses in the Philadelphia Phillies, the flame-thrower faced the minimum in a one-hit, 15-strikeout shutout on June 12.

Through 120 innings this season, Misiorowski has been so good that if he posted a league-average ERA (4.21) for the remaining 42 innings he needs to qualify for the ERA title, he would still rank second in the NL in ERA and third in MLB overall.

It’s actually not that common for the hardest-throwing starter in MLB to also be the best starter in MLB, but Misiorowski appears to have reached that plane of dominance. And it’s not just that he throws triple-digit heat.

It can be argued that this guy is throwing the best fastball in the history of the sport when it comes to everything we use to evaluate pitchers.

Let’s go through every way Jacob Misiorowski’s fastball is a monster

OK, we need to throw out some qualifiers here. The words “best” or “greatest” can mean so many things, hence why GOAT arguments are interminable across sports. It could mean success relative to your peers, but for our purposes, we’re talking about a 1-to-1 comparison level, regardless of era.

So with apologies to quite a few pitchers, we’re going to invoke the Adam Ottavino Principle. That refers to when a very good reliever confidently stated he could strike out Babe Ruth because baseball has never been played at a higher level than it is today when it comes to pure stuff. The pitchers have never thrown harder, and if you were to take a league-average pitcher in 2026 and send him back to the 1920s or maybe even the 1970s, the result would likely be carnage against that era’s batters. It takes years of experience to catch up to a 100-mph fastball, and the only way to do it is to regularly face that level of velocity.

There have obviously been hard throwers in the past, such as Bob Feller and Nolan Ryan. Misiorowski throws harder than them (though no one is saying they couldn’t match him if given access to modern training and techniques).

As MLB.com’s Mike Petriello broke down, there are stories of those guys and others getting measured well past 100 mph, but so much of that mythology is built on single pitches outside of elite competition and a fervent belief that certain radar guns were accurate while producing outlier numbers. Simply hitting 100 mph was a milestone in the 20th century, and it’s basically impossible that any starting pitcher from the days before modern pitch tracking hit 100 mph as regularly as Misiorowski does.

This season, the right-hander has hit triple digits on 42.1% of his four-seam fastballs, per Baseball Savant, and the only other starting pitchers who have reached double digits in that stat are the famously hard-throwing Hunter Green (16.9% in 2025) and Jacob deGrom (15.1% in 2023).

Misiorowski is the apex predator of pitch velocity, but that’s not the only reason we’re saying his fastball is better than any other in history. We can hear the coaches (and Mike Rizzo) already, saying that fastballs are more than velocity. They’re about placement. They’re about trajectory. They’re about movement.

Misiorowski rates from good to elite on all of those, too.

For starters, let’s talk about extension. Releasing the ball closer to the plate than the average pitcher has the same effect as adding speed to your fastball: It gives the batter less time to react. At 6-foot-7, Misiorowski releases the ball as close to the plate as anyone, and that’s why he’s so comically far ahead of the pack in a stat called perceived velocity, which factors in extension to figure out which pitches go from the pitcher’s hand to the strike zone the quickest.

Among starting pitchers in the pitch tracking era, Misiorowski is the all-time leader in fastballs with a perceived speed of at least 103 mph, with 710. Second-most is Jordan Hicks with … six.

There are relievers who have posted hundreds of such pitches, such as Aroldis Chapman (673) and Mason Miller (260), but none of them matches the rate that Misiorowski throws them. And it needs to be said: None of those guys does his thing for more than an inning or two. In that shutout against the Phillies, Misiorowski hit 103.4 mph on his first pitch and 103.1 mph on his final pitch.

Combine that extension with a low arm angle, and you have a pitch designed to fly through the easy-power, uppercut swings that define this era.

As for movement, Misiorowski’s four-seamer is third in spin rate in MLB this season. The actual movement doesn’t rank as high because the ball has so little time to move, but it definitely has life.

As for control, let’s take a look at a Statcast leaderboard that measures the rate at which pitchers land their four-seamers and sinkers in the zone. Misiorowski ranks 45th out of 401 pitchers with at least 100 such pitches this season. Take away the middle-middle part of the zone (i.e. the meatballs), and he ranks 36th.