The Miz Effect: Brewers Are Now One of Baseball's Best Stuff Staffs

Tuesday night was among the Brewers' most dominant pitching performances this season, as four arms combined to hold a depleted Los Angeles Dodgers lineup to a Shohei Ohtani leadoff home run and little else in a 3-1 victory, leaving Milwaukee on the doorstep of a commanding sweep of the top team in the National League. Jacob Misiorowski set the tone with a career-high 12 strikeouts, flashing stuff that left future Hall of Famer and opposing starter Clayton Kershaw impressed.

Things didn't get much easier for the Dodgers after Misiorowski's departure, as the hard-throwing trio of Jared Koenig, Abner Uribe, and Trevor Megill combined for three perfect innings of relief with three more strikeouts. Overall, Brewers pitchers averaged 99.3 mph with their four-seamers and sinkers, tying the single-game record for a team in the pitch-tracking era, according to Baseball Savant.

"That's something special," Megill said postgame. "Miz is throwing 101, and the curveball's almost at 90, or even at 90. Great stuff from him today."

It was fitting that Misiorowski was at the center of the show. He's been at the heart of an in-season staff makeover that has vaulted the Brewers from the bottom third of baseball's velocity leaderboard to near the top. Through May, they were not blowing hitters away with much velocity on the whole. Since the start of June, they've boasted one of the sport's hardest-throwing staffs.

Misiorowski (average fastball velocity of 99 mph), who assumed the rotation spot of Aaron Civale (92 mph) on June 12, bears the most responsibility for the jump. He's not the only contributor, though. At the start of last month, the Brewers designated Tyler Alexander (90 mph) for assignment, and Aaron Ashby (97 mph) and DL Hall (94 mph) have since pitched most of what were once his innings.

Not every pitcher will blow hitters away. Quinn Priester and Jose Quintana continue to occupy rotation spots, for now; Hall still profiles as a mix-and-match guy without his once-explosive fastball; and Brandon Woodruff's new cruising speed might settle in below the 93.3 mph he averaged in his season debut over the weekend. Still, Freddy Peralta's heater is averaging a career-best 94.9 mph, and Priester has flashed an extra tick when he needs it.

It's not just raw velocity, either. More nuanced pitch modeling metrics agree that this iteration of the staff has more dominant stuff. At the end of May, the Brewers ranked 18th with an exactly average 100 Stuff+. Since then, their 106 Stuff+ leads baseball.

The Brewers have excelled at maximizing pitchers with underwhelming stuff, and it will still be part of their larger pitching puzzle. But by and large, the current unit has a vastly different makeup than last year's, and it's much better than what the club took to New York on Opening Day. There are fewer gimmicks and more overpowering velocity and movement. Pitching has long been this club's specialty, and it's only growing stronger, with their new co-ace as both the face of that change and its biggest individual driver.