CHICAGO — Four years before being tasked with saving the season of the Brewers, as he will be asked to do this weekend after Milwaukee lost 6-0 to the Cubs in Game 4 of the best-of-five National League Division Series on Thursday, Jacob Misiorowski received a call from his college coach.

Travis Lallemand had led the Crowder College Rough Riders to the junior college Division I World Series. An injured knee sidelined Misiorowski for the season, but Lallemand still considered the gangly teenager part of the team. The coach asked for the freshman’s ring size. Misiorowski had a better idea.

“How about I just get mine next year?” he said.

Twelve months later, shortly before Milwaukee chose him in the second round of the MLB draft in 2022, Misiorowski helped the Rough Riders return to the annual postseason tournament in Grand Junction, Colo. His fastball touched 101 mph in that World Series.

The Brewers are hoping to see him hit triple digits in Major League Baseball’s Fall Classic, a stage this franchise has not visited since 1982. To get there, Milwaukee will ask Misiorowski, a 23-year-old rookie caught in a whirlwind season, to handle a heavy load in Game 5 on Saturday at American Family Field. He will likely enter the game from the bullpen, a role he undertook in the final weeks of the regular season.

“It adds a little stress to the job,” Misiorowski said. “But you also get the adrenaline of ‘Oh, s—, here it goes, this is it.’”

And Game 5 will be it for the Brewers, for better or for worse, as they aim to avoid adding perhaps the most painful chapter to the team’s recent history of postseason misery. At this time of year, heartbreak calls Milwaukee home. This is the club that endured Trent Grisham’s error in 2019. This is the club that fell victim to the buzzsaw that was the Atlanta Braves in 2021 and felt snake-bitten by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2023. This was the club felled by Pete Alonso’s shocking home run last autumn.

The Brewers will rely on Misiorowski, who supplied three innings of scoreless baseball in Game 2, to get them to the NLCS. (John Fisher / Getty Images)

None of those teams, of course, won as many games as these Brewers. None of those teams held a 2-0 lead over their chief rivals, as these Brewers did just two days ago. And none of those teams spent months creating distance between themselves and the rest of the sport, offering their long-suffering fans the hope that this season might be different.

This is the history staring down Misiorowski on Saturday.

He may not receive a start. But the Brewers will ask him to handle a bulk assignment as he did in a Game 2 victory. Misiorowski spun three scoreless innings while trying to control his pitches and his surging adrenaline. The outing demonstrated his ability to excel while hinting at his potential to implode. His fastball touched 104 mph and crackled with electricity as the Cubs notched only one hit against him. His excitement was so palpable that manager Pat Murphy corralled him after an inning of work and urged him to chill.

“Obviously,” Christian Yelich said before Game 4, “we’re not at full strength as a pitching staff, especially a starting pitching staff.”

Milwaukee will have to gamble on Misiorowski’s readiness on Saturday.

This was not how the Brewers drew it up as recently as a month ago. Heading into August, as Milwaukee raced toward the best record in baseball and homefield advantage throughout the postseason, the rotation looked solid: the trio of Freddy Peralta, Brandon Woodruff and Misiorowski figured to be dynamic. The veneer cracked as Misiorowski lost connection with the strike zone. The disconnect was worrisome enough that, even after Woodruff suffered a strained lat muscle in September, the Brewers did not shift him back into a starting role.

Then again, little in Jacob Misiorowski’s pitching career has gone according to plan.

The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled his senior season at Grain Valley High School in the suburbs of Kansas City and cost him a spot at a Division I school. The knee injury forced him to spend two seasons in junior college. When he flirted with big-league stardom this summer, overwhelming hitters with triple-digit heat and a 94-mph slider, he inadvertently sparked criticism of the All-Star Game selection process. As the season came to a close, he lost his command, his mystique and his spot in Milwaukee’s starting rotation.



The unraveling started when Cubs outfielder Seiya Suzuki hit a line drive off Misiorowski’s shin on July 28. Misiorowski spent two weeks on the injured list. Upon his return, no longer did he resemble a budding ace. Instead, he looked like a rookie pushing past the 100-inning threshold for the first time in his life, grappling with sudden fame and hitters adjusting to his arsenal.

At times, Misiorowski struggled to throw strikes. Murphy lamented a loss of focus after one ugly outing against the Cubs. His first-half ERA was 2.81. After the All-Star break, his ERA ballooned to 5.36 ERA. The team began prepping him for the bullpen near the end of September, even after Woodruff went down.

The loss of Woodruff left the Brewers with little margin for error from their starters. Their two best options, Quinn Priester and Peralta, disappointed during these past two games at Wrigley Field. Priester could not finish the first inning in a Game 3 loss. Peralta dumped the team into a three-run ditch in the first inning of Game 4 and could only log four innings.

In navigating 18 innings in Chicago, Murphy tipped his hand about Game 5. The only two Milwaukee pitchers not to appear in the past two games were closer Abner Uribe and Misiorowski. Uribe could undertake a multi-inning assignment on Saturday; catcher William Contreras joked that Uribe would be willing to start if asked. Misiorowski will certainly need to take down multiple innings, building off his performance in Game 2.

“He’s got to go out there and do his job,” Contreras said through an interpreter. “He hasn’t done anything yet. And that needs to be the mentality here. We have a game to go out there and win. And everyone needs to do their role.”

The Brewers arrived in Chicago holding a two-game lead and fantasizing about resting their staff after a sweep. The team slunk out of Wrigley Field two games later facing the abyss. To keep the season afloat, to avoid living out the nightmare, they will need the remarkable right arm of the kid who once turned down a college World Series ring he hadn’t felt he had earned.

If the Brewers want to think about World Series rings of their own, they will need their youngest pitcher to carry them on Saturday.

“It’s always fun, whenever I get to pitch,” Misiorowski said. “It’s always exciting to be on the field and be in the action.”