This might be as good as it gets for Jacob Misiorowski. If nothing else, his 2026 accomplishments set a bar he’ll gladly take aim at for as long as he throws a baseball.
World Series champion. Most dominant pitcher in Major League Baseball. And, at 24, winner of the National League Cy Young Award.
Misiorowski’s coronation was completed Wednesday, Nov. 11, when he was unanimously named the NL Cy Young winner by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. He’s the youngest Cy Young honoree since Clayton Kershaw won the first of his three NL trophies for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2011.
It’s clear that Misiorowski, in his first full major league season, is just getting started.
Yet it’s already a tall order to outdo the ’26 version of himself.
He led the major leagues in seven major statistical categories, most notably his 1.80 ERA and 252 strikeouts. Misiorowski jammed those into 174⅔ innings pitched, topping all pitchers with 13 strikeouts per nine innings while yielding the fewest hits – 4.9 per nine – of anyone.
In short, as unhittable as a pitcher can be.
It’s what you might expect from a pitcher who threw the six fastest pitches of 2026, topped by a 105.5 mph fastball he threw on the first pitch of the game to likely NL MVP Pete Crow-Armstrong on June 26. The Miz was responsible for 28 of the 35 fastest pitches across the majors this season, ranging from 104 to 105.5 mph.
With great velocity often comes significant injury concerns. But Misiorowski stayed upright all the way through the World Series, throwing a career-high 193⅔ innings, including playoffs, seemingly defying what the human body can do.
Come late October, he wasn’t the strikeout machine he was from March through September. Yet he started Games 1 and 5 of the Brewers’ World Series against Tampa Bay, as they won both games and he gave up just six hits and one run in 10⅔ innings pitched.
That delivered the first World Series championship in Brewers franchise history. And Misiorowski took home the team’s fourth Cy Young Award, first since Corbin Burnes in 2021 and just the second since 1982, when Pete Vuckovich won it during the Brewers’ run to Game 7 of the World Series.
This time, the Brewers finished the job in five games, their ace and their team setting a standard to which he can aspire every single year.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Brewers' Jacob Misiorowski wins NL Cy Young Award in unanimous vote
