By admin 
MILWAUKEE – Xander Bogaerts’ eyes widened and he shook his head.
“I mean, we know who they’re throwing Game 1, right?” he said, infusing a bit of soberness into the Padres’ celebration on Wednesday night. “So, let’s celebrate today, and let’s be ready for the fastball.”
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At that, he chuckled.
Facing Jacob Misiorowski is certainly no laughing matter.
The prohibitive favorite to win the National League Cy Young Award, Misiorowski reaches 100 mph on nearly 35% of his pitches. That is akin to facing Mason Miller for six or seven innings in a game.
Among the five times the Brewers’ 24-year-old ace went at least seven innings while allowing no more than one run this season was May 13 against the Padres on the same mound from which he will cut an imposing figure on Saturday in the opener of the National League Division Series.
The Padres, as a whole, are not good at hitting the fastball.
Fernando Tatis Jr. is the lone Padres player whose batting average against fastballs of any velocity (.308) is better than the league average (.275).
The Padres’ focus will be not chasing Misiorowski’s breaking pitches while remaining ready for the fastball, which is much easier said than done.
“It’s definitely gonna be tough,” Bogaerts said. “… But I feel like in the playoffs every team has at least a couple good arms. Not a lot of guys that might be able to throw 100, 104 as a starter. But they all have good stuff. A lot of teams have two, three starters that have the ability to be aces in any other team. So it’s gonna be a tough, tough task but we’re all up for it.
“Gotta be ready for a pitch and try to execute on whatever mistakes he makes, if he leaves some balls over the plate.”
The Brewers won 22 of the 30 games their 24-year-old ace started, though they did not win that game in May when he shut out the Padres on four hits and struck out 10 in seven innings. Gavin Sheets’ three-run homer off Abner Uribe with two outs in the ninth inning lifted the Padres to a 3-1 victory that day.
The fact that Misiorowski can start twice in this series is no small factor in the Brewers being favored.
As legitimate as that thinking might be, it should also be considered that this Padres offense is entirely different from the one the Brewers saw in May. The Brewers experienced that up close in August when the Padres outscored them 18-7 in a three-game sweep at Petco Park.
“You’re like, ‘Wow.’ This team could be a team to be reckoned with, for sure,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.
It has only gotten better. And more consistently so.
The Padres’ offense was prone to cold spells and was as streaky a group as there was in the major leagues for nearly two-thirds of the season.
But in winning 19 of their past 22 games, they have averaged an MLB-high 6.2 runs a game. They failed to score at least four runs in just three of those games.
In the 66 games from the All-Star break to the end of the regular season, the Padres averaged 5.2 runs per game, tied with the Brewers for second in the major leagues and quite a bit more than the 3.9 runs they averaged in the first half. The Padres’ second-half OPS of .781 also ranked second in the majors, 27 spots better than their .673 mark before the break.
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“We had a really good season, of course, but especially towards the end, we started kicking into different gears,” Bogaerts said. “… I am a big believer in that momentum.”
They certainly carried it into the NL Wild Card Series against the Cubs. The Padres scored eight runs in Game 1 and four in Game 2. They hit four home runs, which is twice as many as they had in three games in the 2025 NL Wild Card Series.
“We’ve got to play our game, continue what we did (against the Cubs), what we’ve been doing for a long time,” Manny Machado said. “If we do that, we’re gonna be all right.”
But pitching was the Cubs’ weakness. It is among the Brewers’ strengths. Likely Game 2 starter Logan Henderson has above-average stuff, posted a 2.47 ERA and struck out nearly 30% of the batters he faced this season. The Brewers’ bullpen had six pitchers who threw at least 50 innings and had an above-average Stuff+ rating, a metric that purports to measure how difficult a pitcher is to hit based on factors such as velocity, spin rate, movement and release point. (The Padres also had six, tying the Brewers for most in the majors.)
So, perhaps most significant when assessing the Padres’ chances is the fact that they have produced against the top-tier starting pitchers they have faced more often than they did earlier in the season.
Since the All-Star break, the Padres have scored at least three runs against Gerrit Cole, Tyler Glasnow, Nick Martinez, Eury Pérez, Chris Sale, Gavin Williams and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Most of those pitchers ranked among the best in the major leagues in ERA and/or Stuff+.
Misiorowski’s 128 Stuff+ rating is the highest in the major leagues among starting pitchers.
Among the 12 teams that made the postseason, the Padres’ .770 OPS against the nastiest pitchers in the league was tops in the major leagues since the trade deadline, according to ESPN. That was based on their production against starting pitchers with a Stuff+ rating of 100 or better and relief pitchers with a Stuff+ rating of 105 or better.
Fernando Tatis Jr. watches his solo home run in the first inning against the Chicago Cubs during Game 1 of the National League Wild Card Series at Petco Park.. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)The turnaround of the offense has been discussed since early August. The better numbers are largely due to Tatis finding his power and Merrill posting close to a 1.000 OPS over a nearly two-month stretch in the second half.
The genesis of the improvement was in players and the hitting staff, headed by rookie hitting coach Steven Souza Jr., coming to understand each other better as the season went on. And that helped the Padres not only feast on bad pitching but make adjustments against good pitching.
“They all got in better spots,” Souza said recently. “They all started trusting the plans. And then when you get confidence as an offense and you see things work, it’s like it doesn’t matter who’s up there. These guys are just so talented that when they’re in good spots and they’ve got the right plans, they’re not necessarily afraid of anybody out there.
“Like Glasnow (on Sept. 24) was unbelievable. Like sharp as he’s ever been. But they just kept going. They just kept knowing somebody is going to push across, somebody’s going to do it. And I think the simplicity of that and knowing at some point, ‘We’re going to get this guy,’ I think helps against the best.”
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This story was originally published October 2, 2026 at 7:09 PM.