Well folks, that's how you answer a bad night. A week after Wrigley Field saw the worst of him, Jacob Misiorowski came home and reminded everybody what the other three hundred sixty days of the calendar look like: 6.1 innings, 9 strikeouts, 1 earned run, fastball back up at 104.5. Whatever went wrong in Chicago, it didn't follow him home.
He left in line for a win, which tells you the kind of night it was. The bullpen and the Cubs had other ideas — Chicago scratched across two runs in the ninth off Trevor Megill to take the lead, and just like that the win was gone, out of Miz's hands entirely. That's baseball. The kid does his job for six-plus innings and the decision gets settled four hours later by people who weren't even in the building when he was pitching.
What happened next might be the best baseball this team has played all year, and it came in three separate acts. Act one: down to their final outs, Pat Murphy reaches into the bench and sends up Christian Yelich to pinch-hit. Two strikes, season on the line for that at-bat if nothing else, and Yelich fights one off and drops a single into the outfield. Line's alive. Act two, two batters later: Jackson Chourio — who's had the kind of year that gets your name in awards conversations — turns on a pitch and it's gone. Twenty-second home run, a new career high, and the deficit that felt so final a few minutes earlier is erased. Tie game. Extra innings.
Act three is the one nobody saw coming, and it's the one that'll get told the longest. Luis Lara had a night to forget before he ever got the chance to save it — oh-for-four, a double-play grounder that snuffed out a rally, two strikeouts, one of them on a check-swing call so close the dugout burned its Automated Ball-Strike challenge trying to get it overturned. By the tenth inning, that's the kind of evening a guy wants to end quietly on the bench. Instead, Pat Murphy found him near the rail before he grabbed his bat, asked him if he was ready, and told him straight up: he believed in him, one hundred percent. Lara walked up to the plate and lined a single into the outfield that brought the winning run home. Ballgame. Brewers 4, Cubs 3. And with that win, Milwaukee becomes the first team in baseball this season to reach 90 wins.
Miz gets a no-decision out of all this — DL Hall was the pitcher of record when the winning run came around — but nobody in that clubhouse is going to tell you he didn't do his job first. Season ERA drops to 1.95, still the best in the game. Record stays 14-5. Some nights the box score doesn't tell the whole story, and this was one of those nights, six times over.