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Will Jacob Misiorowski's season rank as best for a Brewers starter?
Jacob Misiorowski continues to look like the frontrunner for the National League Cy Young Award.
After getting the win in the Milwaukee Brewers ' 8-2 victory over the New York Mets on Thursday night, Aug. 27, Misiorowski is 14-5, with a 1.73 ERA and a league-leading 222 strikeouts in 151 innings. His WHIP of 0.755 also leads qualified pitchers.
Don't count out Atlanta's ageless wonder, Chris Sale – who's 13-9, with a 2.06 ERA, 177 strikeouts in 144 innings and a 1.00 WHIP – but Misiorowski's in the lead.
So it seems like an easy "yes!" when asking if this is the best season a Brewers starting pitcher has ever had.
At least one metric, though, WAR, favors others in team history. At the moment, Misiorowski's Baseball Reference WAR is 5.6 and FanGraphs has him at 5.7.
That's a cumulative mark that will continue to rise through the final month of the season, but he's not going to catch some of the great single seasons. Granted, there's a good reason for that.
Here's a look at the best:
Teddy Higuera, 1986
By bWAR (Baseball Reference), this is the gold standard for any Brewers pitching season (9.4), though remarkably, it's only regarded as his third-best season by FanGraphs.
Higuera's 20 wins mark the last time a Brewers pitcher reached that threshold, when he went 20-11 with a 2.79 ERA and 207 strikeouts in 248 innings. He finished second in the American League Cy Young voting that season to Roger Clemens, who carried all the first-place votes during a dynamite season with Boston.
So why is Higuera's WAR mark so much higher than Miz? It'll have a lot to do with workload – innings factor into the calculation. Higuera had nearly 100 more innings than Misiorowski has thrown in 2026.
Ben Sheets, 2004
Here you have the fWAR (FanGraphs) leader, at 8.0. Sheets only went 12-14 but had a 2.70 ERA in 34 starts and 237 innings, with a franchise-record 264 strikeouts.
That included 18 in a game against Atlanta, one of the singular performances in Brewers history, though one surpassed by Misiorowski's magnum opus against Philadelphia earlier this year.
Sheets somehow only finished eighth in the Cy Young vote that season. Given that the Brewers are likely to proceed with caution the rest of the season with Misiorowski, it seems like Sheets' single-season total may endure.
Corbin Burnes, 2021
The Cy Young-winning performance featured an 11-5 record, a league-leading 2.43 ERA and a remarkable 0.940 WHIP (plus a 1.63 FIP). He also worked eight innings of a game in Cleveland that became a combined no-hitter, the second no-hitter in franchise history.
Burnes only pitched 167 innings that year but still had 234 strikeouts. He went on to reach 190-plus innings each of the next three seasons.
What made his season even crazier was that he allowed just seven homers, two years removed from allowing 17 in 49 innings and posting an 8.82 ERA.
Mike Caldwell, 1978
Mr. Warmth went 22-9 and finished second in the Cy Young voting with an incomprehensible 23 complete games and a 2.36 ERA in 293 innings.
He was the leader of a team that had its first winning season, and he did it with only 131 strikeouts.
The sneaky midseason acquisition in 1977 would go on to start Game 1 of the 1982 World Series for Milwaukee.
Teddy Higuera, 1987
He had a franchise-record 32-inning scoreless streak at one point and had an 18-10 record with a 3.85 ERA and 240 strikeouts in 262 innings.
Teddy Higuera, 1988
He didn't slow down the next year, with a 16-9 mark and 2.45 ERA in 227 innings, with 192 punchouts to 59 walks. He had a 0.999 WHIP to lead the American League.
Chris Bosio, 1989
He went 15-10 with a 2.95 ERA in 33 starts (235 innings), with 173 strikeouts and 48 walks.
Brandon Woodruff, 2021
That Burnes and Woodruff were on the same staff is almost unfair. Woodruff only went 9-10, but he had a 2.56 ERA in 30 starts (179 innings), with 211 strikeouts and 43 walks, good for a WHIP of 0.965.
Freddy Peralta, 2025
It's easy to forget how strong Peralta was last season, when he won a league-leading 17 games and had a 2.70 ERA in 33 starts (177 innings), with 204 strikeouts and a 1.075 WHIP. It was his third consecutive season of reaching 200 strikeouts.
The Brewers traded him in the offseason to the New York Mets, and he wasn't able to replicate his numbers in Milwaukee.
CC Sabathia, 2008
It won't stack up in WAR (that it's still 4.9 is staggering) because it was only a partial season, but it's obviously the year Brewers fans remember when asked to name a great performance by a starting pitcher.
After his midseason arrival from Cleveland, Sabathia went 11-2 with a 1.65 ERA and 128 strikeouts over 131 dazzling innings as the Brewers snapped a 26-year playoff drought.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Will Jacob Misiorowski's season rank as best for a Brewers starter?
Will Jacob MisiorowskiBrewersSurelyBut WARJacob MisiorowskiNational League Cy Young AwardAfterMilwaukee BrewersNew York MetsAugMisiorowskiERA
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