Crew's top Minors arm could follow former ace's path

This story was excerpted from Adam McCalvy’s Brewers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

MILWAUKEE – No. 32 overall prospect Jacob Misiorowski’s first abbreviated outing for Triple-A Nashville didn’t go to plan. But it didn’t always go to plan for Corbin Burnes, either.

“We still kind of go off that transition,” Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook said. “I wrote it up back then, and it seemed to work well for Corbin. Obviously, he’s a unicorn in a lot of ways. But it worked for other guys, too.”

Burnes in 2018, like 22-year-old Misiorowski today, was the Brewers’ top pitching prospect. And like Misiorowski today, he still had some Minor League seasoning in front of him. But as the ‘18 All-Star break approached, the Brewers believed the Burnes had a chance to jump to the Majors as a bullpen arm in the second half of that season, so they engineered a gradual transition to get him used to short bursts of relief.

“It’s like switching an infielder from third to second,” Hook said. “If you think, ‘Oh, he’s an infielder,’ but it’s kind of like, ‘No, it’s a little different.’”

In Burnes’ case, he jumped right to the late innings that June and delivered two scoreless frames in his first relief appearance. But then he had a couple of rough outings in a row, giving up nine hits and seven earned runs over 3 1/3 innings of his next two appearances before settling in and cruising to the Majors by the second week of July.

And in that case, the Brewers were right. Burnes quickly made an impact by going 8-0 with a 2.49 ERA in 36 appearances after his callup – including 30 games in the regular season and six more high-leverage appearances in the postseason.

The Brewers would be over the moon to get a shorter burst of that from Misiorowski, whose own transition began with a planned short start for Triple-A Nashville on Saturday in which he walked three batters and hit another in one-plus inning, and was charged with two earned runs.

The outing was Misiorowski’s first game without a strikeout since his professional debut on Sept. 1, 2022, for Single-A Carolina, soon after the Brewers drafted him in the second round. That day, he walked four and threw 32 pitches to get one out. Command has always been the challenge for Misiorowski, whose raw stuff is unrivaled.

If he can corral it, it’s good enough to get Major League hitters out. Whether he gets that chance, Brewers manager Pat Murphy said, “is up to him.”

“Keep making strides,” Murphy said. “Be consistent.”

There’s a limited runway left for Misiorowski, who has struck out 105 batters in 80 2/3 innings since the end of Spring Training. That workload is up from 71 1/3 innings last season for three affiliates, and the Brewers do have a cap in mind, though they don’t want to share it publicly.

General manager Matt Arnold said only that the club would be careful. The Brewers still see Misiorowski as a top-end starting pitcher in the long term.

"I don’t know if we have a hard cap,” Arnold said. “We certainly want to be cautious with a young player like that, especially with the type of pedigree Misiorowski has. He’s got a tremendous ceiling for us and we’re moving him to Triple-A to see what he can do, and potentially [he can] help us here in the second half."

Said Hook: “If he does it well, then we’ll see what we’ve got here.”