Misiorowski dominates as Brewers win 3-1 thriller

Miz bounces back from his first rough outing with a gem

Box Score

Monday evening’s matchup between Freddy Peralta and Yoshinobu Yamamoto was billed as an exciting matchup between All-Stars, but it turned out to be a bit of a dud when the Brewers’ offense chased Yamamoto in the first inning. Tonight’s matchup was also billed as a big pitching matchup, between the weathered legend, Clayton Kershaw, and the young, budding superstar, Jacob Misiorowski, big-time pitchers at the opposite ends of their careers. This one lived up to the matchup, as both pitchers lasted six innings and the game was within a run when they left the game. But while Kershaw willed his way to six solid innings by nibbling at edges and using craft to overcome the stuff that he’s lost, Misiorowski was thoroughly dominant after an early hiccup.

Yesterday, it was the Brewers that got out to an early lead. Tonight, it was the Dodgers.

Misiorowski started Shohei Ohtani with a 100-mph fastball down the middle and got ahead 0-2 when Ohtani swung at a curveball when he was expecting another fastball. But Ohtani is the reigning MVP for a reason, and when Miz threw another curveball — one that was in the zone, rather than below it — Ohtani was ready, and he blasted it out to deep center. Misiorowski recovered nicely, though, by striking out Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Andy Pages in order to end the first inning with the Dodgers up 1-0.

Sal Frelick popped out to start the bottom of the first against Kershaw, but the Brewers got their first baserunner when William Contreras hit a dribbler down the third-base line that stayed fair for an infield hit. But Jackson Chourio popped out, Christian Yelich grounded out to first, and the one-out baserunner went for naught.

Three-pitch strikeouts of Michael Conforto and Hyeseong Kim made five straight for Miz after the Ohtani homer to open the game. Dalton Rushing fell behind 0-2, and Miz was one strike away from an immaculate inning, but Rushing knocked a two-out single to keep the inning alive. James Outman struck out, too, though, and while Misiorowski had given up a couple of hits through the first two innings, he’d gotten all six of his outs via strikeout.

Kershaw found his strikeout stuff in the bottom of the second and got Andrew Vaughn swinging and Isaac Collins looking to start the inning (the 3,001st and 3,002nd strikeouts of Kershaw’s career). Brice Turang made contact, but it was a weak grounder to first, and Kershaw was through two scoreless innings.

Miguel Rojas started the third with a leadoff double out of the nine spot in the Dodgers’ order. Miz got some revenge on Ohtani when, after an at-bat in which Ohtani fouled off a bunch of pitches and worked an 0-2 count back to 2-2, Miz got him swinging at the same curveball that Ohtani blasted out in the first inning. Betts followed and very nearly went deep — he hit it 398 feet to center field — but Chourio caught it while bumping into the wall, allowing Rojas to tag up to third. Freeman was next and should have walked, but Misiorowski got a generous call on a low 3-1 fastball and struck Freeman out with the next pitch.

Andruw Monasterio led off the bottom of the third and sent the left fielder Conforto back to the wall, but it didn’t quite have enough juice to get over the wall. Joey Ortiz followed with a weak groundout, and Frelick grounded out too, and Kershaw had a shutout through three.

Misiorowski’s velocity may have dipped a little as he crossed the 60-pitch threshold in the fourth inning, but it didn’t matter — he got Pages on a soft liner and struck out Conforto and Kim. Through four, Miz had 10 strikeouts and 16 whiffs.

Contreras doubled down on his first-inning strategy and hit another weak dribbler for an infield hit in almost the same spot as the one he’d gotten in the first inning. Contreras had two swinging-bunt hits for singles, and they were the Brewers’ only hits. It didn’t stay that way, though, as Chourio followed Contreras with a base hit on a grounder through the right side, and Milwaukee was in business with two on and no outs. Kershaw got the first out when Yelich lined out to left field, but the Brewers broke through when Monday’s hero, Vaughn, lined an RBI single into left. Collins had a chance to give Milwaukee the lead with runners on the corners and one out, and he did just that when he snuck a single between Rojas and Betts on the left side of the infield. Vaughn was thrown out at third on a very close play for the second out, but the Brewers had a 2-1 lead.

Turang followed with another hit, the Brewers’ fifth of the inning, and set up another runners-on-the-corners situation for Monasterio, but he popped out to second base to end the inning. The Brewers could have done more damage had Vaughn not been thrown out at third, but it wasn’t an unreasonable risk that he took, and it was a very close play, so it’s hard to blame him too much.

Misiorowski retook the mound with the lead, and the juices were flowing at this point. He struck out Rushing to start things, set the Brewers’ new season-high in strikeouts when Outman became his 12th victim, and got Rojas to fly out to center on the first pitch he saw. Miz was through five, and since giving up the leadoff homer to Ohtani, he’d retired 15 of 17, allowed only two singles and no walks, and had struck out 12. (Not that he’d ever be allowed to throw the requisite pitches, but at 12 strikeouts through 15 outs, Miz was easily ahead of the MLB-record strikeout pace.)

Ortiz, leading off the fifth, got a hold of a slider and hit a foul ball that had home-run distance, but Kershaw snagged a comebacker on the next pitch and retired him for the first out. Kershaw struck out Frelick, and Contreras grounded out for the third out.

At 74 pitches, Misiorowski was allowed to go back out for the sixth inning to face the top of the Dodger order for a third time. Miz and Ohtani had a fun, long battle, but Ohtani drew a walk on a 3-2 pitch that missed by a whisker off the inside corner. Betts then reached when he got jammed but hit a soft liner in just the right spot on the right side of the infield, and Misiorowski was in a jam.

But this is where Misiorowski’s well-rested defense came to the rescue.

First, Freeman smoked a grounder down the right field line that looked destined for the right-field corner and a two-run double, but Vaughn dove and snagged it and took it to the bag for the first out. Next, with runners on second and third and one out, an equally hard-hit grounder to the opposite side of the infield was snagged by Monasterio, who made an acrobatic and perfect throw home to get Ohtani at the plate for the second out. A harmless grounder to first ended the inning, and Miz was through what might have been his most impressive start yet, which is saying something.

The final line on Misiorowski: six innings, four hits, one walk, one run, and 12 strikeouts, the most by a Brewers pitcher this season (eclipsing Quinn Priester’s 11 from a couple of starts ago). Miz told us something about his makeup, too. Coming off his first major league hiccup, he allowed a leadoff homer and had to keep going against one of the scariest lineups in modern baseball history. But that homer flipped a switch in Miz, and for the next five innings, he was utterly unhittable. In the sixth, he showed some real guts, and the fact that Pat Murphy stuck with him when he got into some trouble shows that he’s really starting to believe.

Chourio popped out to shallow right for the first out of the bottom of the sixth, but Yelich reached when a Kershaw fastball got away and hit him high on the front shoulder. Vaughn followed with a strikeout, and the Brewers were again threatening against Kershaw. But Collins hit a hard grounder right at Betts, which started a 6-4-3 double play, and we headed to the seventh with the score still 2-1.

With three straight lefties due up for the Dodgers, Jared Koenig came in as the first man out of the Brewer bullpen. He had absolutely no problem, as he retired all three of those lefties on just nine pitches.

Alex Vesia replaced Kershaw in the seventh, which ended a sneakily good start — he finished with two runs allowed on six hits and a walk in six innings. For the second time in this one, Monasterio hit one to the warning track in left, but that was the only moment of excitement for the Brewer offense in the seventh as they went 1-2-3 against Vesia.

Milwaukee kept the heat on the Dodger lineup by bringing in Abner Uribe and his upper-90s heat. Uribe got Rojas to fly out to left, got Ohtani on a grounder (on the Platonic ideal of what a sinker is supposed to do), and struck out Betts on a very nasty slider.

With just a one-run edge, the Brewers came into the bottom of the eighth looking for a little insurance for Trevor Megill, and they didn’t have to wait long. With Kirby Yates in for the Dodgers, Frelick led off the inning with a solo shot into the Dodger bullpen, just over the wall in right center. It was Frelick’s seventh of the season, improbably moving him into fourth on the team.

Contreras followed that up with a hard line-drive single to left, and Chourio worked an eight-pitch walk to put runners on first and second for Yelich, and Yates hadn’t gotten an out yet. But the Brewers did Yates a favor; on a 3-2 pitch, Yelich struck out, and Contreras, who ran on the pitch, was a sitting duck at third in a strike-em-out, throw-em-out double play. Vaughn ripped a line drive just foul down the left field line that would have scored Chourio, but he struck out on the next pitch, and the Brewers would turn a 3-1 lead over to Megill.

Megill got ahead of Freeman 0-2 with two beautiful curveballs to start things, and struck him out a couple of pitches later on a 100-mph heater. Megill nearly hit Pages with the first pitch he threw him, but struck him out five pitches later on a knee-buckling curveball. Conforto stood as the last chance for the Dodgers, and on the second pitch he saw, he grounded out to Turang and the Brewers had a 3-1 victory.

The top speed from Brewers pitchers tonight: Miz 101.6, Koenig 99.5, Uribe 98.7, Megill 101.3. That’s some gas.

Heck of a ballgame. Jacob Misiorowski continues to be a gigantic story, as he recovered from his first rough outing by having his best start yet, considering the opponent was the best offense in baseball. The Brewers have now gotten back-to-back excellent starts against the Dodgers and clinched the series against the National League’s top team. On offense, the Brewers got three hits and a run scored from Contreras, a hit and a walk from Chourio, an RBI single and a walk from Vaughn, an RBI single from Collins, and the big homer from Frelick.

The series wraps up tomorrow in another notable pitching matchup. Jose Quintana takes the hill for the Brewers, while Tyler Glasnow makes his return to the Dodger rotation — he hasn’t pitched in the majors since April 27. That game is at 1:10 p.m. on FanDuel Sports Network Wisconsin, and for those out of market, you can catch it on MLB Network.