Jacob Misiorowski was supposed to start in Atlanta on Friday, June 19. That assignment arrived only days after he threw the best start in Brewers history, a complete-game, one-hit shutout that left the Philadelphia Phillies with nothing to show for six innings and then some.
The line was almost unreal even by elite standards: 6-0, 15 strikeouts, 95 pitches and the minimum 27 batters faced. Kyle Schwarber’s single was the only baserunner against Misiorowski, and he was wiped out on a double play, so the game never slipped beyond the cleanest version of a pitcher’s night. That is why the outing stood apart from the rest of the Milwaukee Brewers’ past decade. The club has had only four complete games in that span, with Jimmy Nelson in 2017, Adrian Houser in 2021 and Brandon Woodruff on Sept. 11, 2023 among them.
There is history inside the performance, too. Misiorowski became the first Brewers pitcher to work a complete game with double-digit strikeouts since Yovani Gallardo on June 24, 2010, and the last Brewers starter to get through nine innings in fewer than 100 pitches before him was Kyle Lohse, whose 89-pitch Maddux came against Atlanta in a 4-0 win on Sept. 25, 2013. Lohse also threw a 93-pitch complete-game shutout against the Chicago Cubs on June 1, 2014. Misiorowski’s effort pushed past all of that by pairing volume and speed: 15 strikeouts in 95 pitches, the most strikeouts ever in a Maddux game in Major League Baseball history.
That record matters because the threshold is so unforgiving. No pitcher had ever reached 14 strikeouts in a Maddux before, and only Clayton Kershaw and Tarik Skubal had done it with 13. Even for a club with a long pitching lineage, this was a rare kind of night. Misiorowski was the seventh pitcher in Brewers history to record a Maddux, and one of 12 Maddux instances in team history, but none had matched the force of his June 12 win over the Philadelphia Phillies.
The one detail that keeps the story from sounding too neat is also the one that proves how unusual it was: no Brewers starter had ever worked a full nine innings and faced the minimum 27 batters until Misiorowski did it. He did it without a walk, without a second hit and without any sign that the game could bend away from him. The next test was already waiting in Atlanta, where the Brewers faced the National League East-leading Braves, and the question was no longer whether Misiorowski had arrived. It was whether he could keep making history look routine.
