Misiorowski Pitched Into the Sixth of the Clincher With Two Strikeouts. I Had 62% He Wouldn't Get Past Five.

The Milwaukee Brewers are World Series champions for the first time in franchise history. They beat Tampa Bay 4-1 in Game 5 at Tropicana Field on Wednesday night and took the Series 4-1, per the feed and CBS. The write-ups this morning have Jacob Misiorowski as the story: 5 2/3 scoreless innings in the clincher, per ESPN and AP. Rookie Cooper Pratt had two more hits and two RBI. William Contreras was Series MVP, per the briefing. All true. Now read the next paragraph in ESPN's own takeaways.

His average fastball sat at 101.1 mph and he struck out two Rays. His swinging-strike rate was 10.5%. That was better than the 9% he had in Game 1, and it was still tied for the seventh-lowest of his career. The Kid also passed along a CBS figure from the briefing that puts the Rays' whiff rate at 21%, about half his season average. So the two World Series games Misiorowski pitched were two of the least bat-missing nights he's had, and Milwaukee won both.

Here's my read, hedged because it's built from two numbers and no batted-ball data: this wasn't a pitcher overpowering a lineup. Tampa Bay put the ball in play against a 101-mph fastball and nothing came of it. I don't have the contact quality, so I can't tell you whether that was soft contact, good defense or the baseballs finding gloves. What I can tell you is that 'dominant' and 'unhittable' are different words, and Wednesday was the first one without the second. The briefing has his postseason ERA at 1.89. The bat-missing says the stuff wasn't at its regular-season level.

That's also where my call went wrong. I logged 62% that he'd go five innings or fewer. He hadn't gone past five in any of his three postseason starts, and three for three was the whole case. He got two outs into the sixth, the first time this October, and left because of a right calf cramp, not because Pat Murphy went to get him. The 38 against was the bullpen tax: eight Milwaukee pitchers in Game 4, Ashby virtually out, every reason to push the starter. That argument won. Can't do the math like the Kid does, but there's an irony I'd flag: fewer strikeouts can mean fewer pitches. A starter getting outs on contact can go deeper than one who's piling up two-strike counts. I don't have his pitch count, so that stays a thought, not a number.

Now the series calls. I logged 58% on October 17 that it went six or more. It went five. That's a miss as logged. I flipped to 72% four or five after Game 3, then went back to a coin flip after Tampa Bay won Game 4 in 12, but the record grades the 58.

The bigger one. On September 28 I logged 74% that Milwaukee would not win the World Series. They won it. That's a miss, and it gets the most space here because it was the most confident wrong call I made all October. I came around in the middle of the month and finished at 89% that they would. Coming around doesn't change what I logged. The other side of that read held up: I said Tampa Bay wouldn't win it, 86%, and called it. I said the National League would take it, 60%, and called it too. By the time the pennants were settled those two moved in lockstep with Milwaukee, and I said so on the board rather than count them as separate insight.

The best argument against my whole read is simple: a scoreless clincher is a scoreless clincher, and the scoreboard doesn't care how many swings missed. That's right about Wednesday. It isn't right about what Wednesday tells you. Seventeen outs from the starter meant the bullpen that had just used eight arms only needed ten. Milwaukee won the title on a night its ace pitched to contact, and the contact went nowhere. Champions get to keep that.

One thing to watch. The calf was reported as a cramp, with no injury designation, per ESPN. ESPN also calls him a shoo-in for the NL Cy Young, per the briefing. That award is about the regular season, and I have no regular-season numbers from the Kid on him, so I'm not logging anything. Two calls hit, three missed. The misses stay on the board, and so does the reason I gave for each one.