What Brewers' latest round of roster cuts means for Jacob Misiorwoski's 2025 season

The Milwaukee Brewers made another series of roster cuts on Friday. There was nothing overly unexpected, but the headliner in this round of moves was Jacob Misiorowski, who was reassigned to minor league camp.

Misiorowski is the Brewers top pitching prospect and has some of the nastiest raw stuff in the minor leagues. He’s also approaching his 23rd birthday and he finished last season at Triple-A Nashville, so he’s not far from the big leagues. There was speculation that he could make his debut out of the Brewer bullpen at the end of last season, and while that didn’t end up happening, just the fact that it was a conversation means affirms the belief that he isn’t far away.

It's not exactly surprising, but that debut will have to wait a bit. Misirowski has one big flaw: his control. We’ve seen everything that the Misirowski entails—good and bad—this spring. He has at times looked unhittable, like when he threw three perfect innings with three strikeouts on March 6th versus the Athletics. But Miz’s wild side has been on display as well, such as when he walked three in his first outing of the spring on February 25th, or in his last start versus the Cubs when he recorded just five outs while allowing four runs on three hits and two walks.

What does missing big league roster mean for Jacob Misiorowski’s future?

The short answer is not very much. Misiorowski, who isn’t yet on the Brewers’ 40-man roster, was not expected to be part of the major league team out of the gate unless the Brewers were faced with far worse injury issues than they’ve already dealt with or he was particularly dominant.

What this does show us is that the team feels he needs more seasoning. The Brewers seem committed—for now—to using Misiorowski as a starting pitcher, and it is extremely rare for starting pitchers to walk as many batters as Miz does; the major-league leader among qualified pitchers (roughly 160 or more innings) was Chris Bassit, who walked 3.7 batters per nine innings.

In the minor leagues last year, Misiorowski walked 5.5 per nine innings. Only two pitchers who threw 50 or more innings in the majors last year walked batters at that rate, and both were hard-throwing relievers with track records of major league success who had down seasons, Camilo Doval and Aroldis Chapman.

Miz’s control problems can be offset more easily if he’s in the bullpen, when he can pitch at maximum effort 100% of the time. That’s where he finished last season and where many scouts think he’ll end up, but the Brewers want to see if they can make it work with him in the starting rotation. If that’s the case, they’ll want him to get those walks down a bit.

As we’ve mentioned at Reviewing the Brew before, there’s precedent for tall, lanky flamethrowers with control problems to overcome and become stars: Randy Johnson, one of the ten best pitchers ever, had even worse walk numbers than Misiorowski in his first few seasons in the big leagues.

It's unlikely that anyone in the Milwaukee front office is expecting Misiorowski to become a Hall of Famer, but clearly someone there feels that they can get more value out of him as a starter than as a reliever. It seems likely that the Brewers will see how he does over the first couple months as a starter in Nashville, keep an eye on the health of the major league roster, and see how things develop. In either case, expect to see Misiorowski sometime this summer, though his results over the first couple months and the needs of the major league team will determine whether that’s in a starting or relief role.

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