Over the first couple weeks of his MLB career, Milwaukee Brewers righty Jacob Misiorowski has left everyone wondering how anyone ever got a hit off of him. Standing 6-foot-8 with a triple-digits fastball and a "slider" that routinely sat in the mid-90s, the former second-round pick became an overnight sensation: It took him 11 innings to give up his first hit, and he entered Wednesday's outing against the New York Mets with 10 baserunners allowed and 19 strikeouts across his first 16 innings. What are you supposed to do with that?
Luckliy for 29 other teams, the New York Mets provided the answer on Wednesday night. And it turned out to be surprisingly simple: You just let him beat himself.
BRANDON NIMMO GRAND SLAM!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/axZBXhPyMd
— SNY (@SNYtv) July 2, 2025
Misiorowski came crashing back to Earth in a 7-3 loss, giving up five runs over just 3.2 innings of work. His stuff was as electric as ever. His command, however, was not: The righty walked two batters, and they were both back-breakers, two non-competitive at-bats against light-hitting infielders Brett Baty and Ronny Mauricio that helped load the bases for the top of the Mets order. Now forced to just pound the strike zone, Brandon Nimmo jumped on the first pitch he saw and parked it into the right-field seats for a grand slam.
The very next batter Misiorowski faced, Francisco Lindor, took him deep again on a pitch that missed its intended location by a full foot.
Francisco Lindor makes it BACK-TO-BACK JACKS 🚀 pic.twitter.com/po9QNiUNdM
— MLB (@MLB) July 2, 2025
Some of this is certainly just normal rookie regression, and some of it is all of the league's advance scouting power brought to bear on a pitcher who probably caught some people by surprise. But what got Misiorowski in trouble on Wednesday is also the exact same thing that prospect evaluators have been concerned with throughout his rise to MLB stardom, and it could be the thing that rains on his parade as the season continues.
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Mets exploited Jacob Misiorowski's one big weakness: his command
There's a reason why Misiorowski, while certainly a top prospect, didn't come with the same sort of cachet as, say, Paul Skenes. The stuff was obvious, and the Minor League numbers were good. But the righty has never had even average command, going back to his draft year out of tiny Crowder College.
MLB Pipeline graded his control a 40 in its most recent top-100 update, and it's not hard to see why: While Misiorowski had no problem overpowering Minor League hitters, he also walked plenty of them, with a 5.9 BB/9 in Double-A and a 4.6 mark in Triple-A. Both of those numbers are not great, and it's clear that the problem didn't just disappear when he started facing the best hitters on the planet.
No, Misiorowski is still about as erratic as he's always been, capable of looking like a Cy Young favorite one day and simply not having it the next. The Brewers will take that trade for the most part, but it was interesting to see the Mets bring a different approach to bear on the righty on Wednesday, throwing 72 pitches in fewer than four innings. New York had a plan to simply force Misiorowski to come to them, and no matter how good his stuff is, he's going to struggle if he can't do that more successfully moving forward.
Especially because he's essentially a two-pitch pitcher, fastball-slider to righties and fastball-curveball to lefties. That gives hitters a pretty good idea of what to expect, and makes execution all the more crucial. Misiorowski made things look easy at first, but in reality his margin for error is smaller than you'd think.