Tropicana Field Gave Misiorowski His Fastball Back — and It Ended the Rays' Season

Here is the cruelest detail of the 2026 World Series: the pitch that ended Tampa Bay's season got its life back inside Tampa Bay's own building. Jacob Misiorowski, Milwaukee's 24-year-old ace, spent a month watching his fastball lose its rise. Then he walked into Tropicana Field for Game 5 — and, according to Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, the Rays' home park handed it back to him, two extra inches of carry at a time.

The result is already in the books: Brewers 4, Rays 1 in Game 5 on Wednesday, October 28, a 4-1 series win and the first championship in Milwaukee's 57-year history. What Verducci's reporting adds is the how — and the how is a ballpark effect so measurable that Milwaukee's pitching staff apparently planned around it before the game was even played.

A fastball that was sinking, start by start

First, the problem. Misiorowski's four-seamer lives on what pitching people call induced vertical break — IVB — the way its spin fights gravity so the ball drops less than a hitter expects. When Misiorowski is right, Verducci wrote, his fastball beats the no-spin drop by 15.3 inches; the major-league average is 15.6. Entering September, he had only two games all year with an IVB as low as 14.6, one of them at Coors Field, a notorious IVB killer. Then the workload caught up: over his next eight starts, as he worked some 50 innings past his previous year's total, his IVB fell to 14.6 or below six times.

Milwaukee pitching coaches Chris Hook and Jim Henderson worked with him before the World Series on sinking less into his legs and moving faster through his delivery, Verducci reported. Game 1 did not fix it: Misiorowski stayed at 14.6 IVB, with the lowest release point of his year. The Brewers won that game anyway, 3-2, on Jackson Chourio's seventh-inning single — but their ace was winning on fumes, and the numbers show what that costs. Hitters this year batted .270 against four-seamers under 16 IVB, Verducci noted, and just .224 against fastballs at 16 or better. In Misiorowski's first three postseason starts, all in Milwaukee, opponents hit .412 against his fastball and barreled it up on 10 percent of plate appearances.

Then came the Trop

Hook, Verducci wrote, was not worried before Game 5, for one specific reason: the game was at Tropicana Field. "I've been coming here for eight years," Hook told Verducci before the game, "and I've never known anyone who didn't have better vert pitching here." Milwaukee hitting coach Dan Vogelbach backed it up from the other side of the ball: "Everybody knows it. That's why for years the Rays have had over-the-top power pitchers with a big breaking ball. The mound is a little higher here."

Whatever the cause — and Verducci noted that Major League Baseball regularly measures mounds to assure they conform to the rules — the effect in Game 5 was immediate and dramatic. Misiorowski's fastball jumped to a 16.3 IVB, his fourth-highest mark of the year and his best carry since July 2, without throwing any harder or spinning the ball any faster. He threw 57 fastballs. The Rays barreled up none of them. Opponents hit .182 against the pitch in Game 5, with a barrel rate of zero — against .412 and 10 percent in his Milwaukee starts. Same arm, same velocity, different building.

He was brilliant until a leg cramp forced him out with two outs in the sixth inning, Verducci reported, and the finish put him in rare company: only the fourth starting pitcher ever to win a World Series clincher while allowing no runs and as few as four baserunners, joining Ralph Terry in 1962, Tom Glavine in 1995 and Derek Lowe in 2004 — and, at 24, the youngest of the four to do it. "He's had an A game most of the year," Hook told Verducci. "This past four weeks probably is, I would say, B minus game. Tonight was probably in that A range again."

It was not just Misiorowski

The part that turns a curiosity into an indictment is the breadth of it. Verducci tabulated the other Milwaukee starters in the series: Robert Gasser's IVB rose from 14.4 everywhere else to 15.8 at the Trop, Dustin May's jumped from 15.2 to 18.2, and Misiorowski's own split was 15.2 away, 16.3 at Tropicana. Every Brewer starter got a boost in the Rays' park.

And the Rays live with the mirror image of it all season. In a 6,851-pitch sample Verducci cited, Tampa Bay's own four-seamers averaged 17.5 IVB at home against 16.4 on the road, and opponents hit .201 with a .369 slugging percentage against them at the Trop versus .245 and .443 away. League-wide, Tropicana Field posted the highest average IVB of any ballpark in 2026 at 17.2, just ahead of Miami's loanDepot Park at 17.1, with Toronto and San Diego next at 16.5 — indoor baseball, Verducci concluded, is good for extra ride. His line deserves to survive the winter: what Coors Field is for hitters, Tropicana Field is for four-seam pitchers.

None of this takes anything off Milwaukee's title. The Brewers won 103 games, went 11-2 in the postseason according to Bleacher Report's series recap, swept the 100-win Dodgers out of the National League Championship Series and took three of the five World Series games in which their pitching was supposedly compromised. They also had William Contreras behind the plate for the clincher — the series MVP, per Baseball Almanac, who hit .381 in the series and guided the staff to a 2.13 ERA. Great teams find edges. Milwaukee found one growing in the other team's yard, recognized it before the first pitch, and rode it to a parade.

But spare a thought for Tampa Bay, because this one stings in a specific way. The Rays built a pitching identity around exactly this effect — over-the-top power arms whose fastballs play up under that roof — and in the biggest game in franchise history since 2020, the effect showed up wearing the other uniform. The Trop giveth. In Game 5, it took the whole season away.

More from Previously's World Series coverage: Frelick ties it and Pratt wins it in Game 2, and the Gold Gloves that followed the title — plus today's free-agency opening.