Sunday night’s National League Championship Series opener in Milwaukee has the kind of pitching card that can quiet a ballpark before the first fastball lands. Brewers right-hander Jacob Misiorowski will take the mound against Dodgers left-hander Tarik Skubal at 8 p.m. ET, 7 p.m. CT, on FOX, FOX Deportes and FOX One, with two clubs carrying 100-win weight and a recent October score to settle.
Milwaukee was swept by Los Angeles in last year’s NLCS and is still chasing the first World Series championship in franchise history. The Dodgers, meanwhile, arrive with Skubal, their headline acquisition at the Trade Deadline, trying to push the club toward a third consecutive title. The Brewers had their own chance to make the highest bid for Skubal during the deadline market, and that decision will linger over this series if the left-hander dominates the lineup they chose to face instead.
Misiorowski has made the case to be the National League Cy Young Award favorite with a 1.80 ERA, a rare sub-2.00 mark for a qualified starter over the past half-century. He has brought overwhelming velocity, the lowest expected ERA among right-handed starters, and perhaps the most difficult single-season hitting environment any starter has created. His track record remains short—he threw 66 innings with a 4.36 ERA a year ago—but the present version of Misiorowski has been nearly impossible to ignore.
Skubal brings the longer résumé. He won the past two American League Cy Young Awards and was removed from a possible third straight bid only because his deadline move put him in the National League. Over the past three seasons, no pitcher has accumulated more pitching WAR, and he led the NL in that category after joining the Dodgers. His rapid return from elbow surgery became so notable that the procedure has taken on the informal name “Skubal Scope.”
There is a chance the two will meet again in a possible Game 5 at Dodger Stadium. For now, Game 1 is enough: the hardest kind of assignment for hitters, with Misiorowski’s power from the right side and Skubal’s complete left-handed arsenal framing the series from the first inning.
A rare place in October history
A rolling 1,000-day version of Enhanced Game Score places Skubal first among active pitchers and Misiorowski fourth entering the opener. The measure builds from the traditional Game Score framework—innings, outs, strikeouts, walks and hits—then gives more influence to recent performance while retaining part of the previous two seasons. That helps explain why Misiorowski, despite his extraordinary 2026, remains behind Skubal: the calculation still includes his limited and less dominant work from 2025.
Pedro Martínez owns the highest peak in the measure’s history, with his high point arriving on May 31, 2001. At that stage, he had already authored his celebrated 1999 and 2000 seasons and opened 2001 with a 1.44 ERA and 121 strikeouts across 11 starts. Clayton Kershaw, Vida Blue, Dwight Gooden and Greg Maddux follow near the top of the historical list, with Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Steve Carlton and Tom Seaver also among the standout runs.
The current top five reads Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Chris Sale, Misiorowski and Cam Schlittler. On Opening Day this season, Skubal led Zack Wheeler, Paul Skenes, Cristopher Sánchez and Sale, with Yamamoto just behind that group. Misiorowski’s climb has been steep enough that he is expected to keep moving upward as each day from his earlier record falls out of the 1,000-day window.
Since 1971, nearly 1,500 postseason starts have been made. Only 13 of those starts came in games matching two pitchers ranked among the top four at that moment. That puts Skubal against Misiorowski in roughly the top 1% of postseason pitching pairings over the last 55 years.
The earlier matchups include Fernando Valenzuela against Nolan Ryan in the 1981 NLDS; Valenzuela against John Tudor in the 1985 NLCS; Gooden versus Mike Scott in the 1986 NLCS; and Gooden against Clemens in the 1986 World Series. Clemens faced Dave Stewart twice in the 1990 ALCS. Later entries included Kershaw against Adam Wainwright in 2014, Kershaw against Max Scherzer and Jake Arrieta against Madison Bumgarner in 2016, Justin Verlander against Sale in 2018, Gerrit Cole against Scherzer in the 2019 World Series, and Cole against Shane Bieber in the 2020 AL Wild Card Series. Sale’s recent NLDS duel with Yamamoto was the first such game in six years.
There were close calls during the long gap between 1991 and 2013. Randy Johnson met Maddux in the 2001 postseason, though Maddux sat just outside the top five as his prime was winding down. Maddux never drew Martínez or Clemens in October, and Johnson never faced Martínez there. In 2010, Tim Lincecum, ranked fifth, started against top-ranked Roy Halladay and second-ranked Cliff Lee, but neither matchup cleared the top-four threshold.
By the average ranking of the two starters, Sunday’s game stands tied for third among all postseason matchups in that span. The standard remains the 1986 NLCS opener, when No. 1 Gooden opposed No. 2 Scott. Scott threw a 14-strikeout shutout in Houston’s 1-0 win, during a stretch in which he and Gooden captured Cy Young Awards in consecutive seasons. The next-best pairing came in Game 4 of the 1990 ALCS, with No. 1 Clemens facing No. 3 Stewart. Stewart worked eight innings and allowed one run, while Clemens was ejected in the second inning after disputing the strike zone.
Skubal and Misiorowski now join that neighborhood, with the extra edge of a 100-win NLCS rematch and Milwaukee’s unfinished business against Los Angeles. Great names have crossed October paths before, but few arrived pitching this well at the same time. The series may turn on many things after Sunday. It begins with two arms that have already made the opener feel like its own event.
