Chase Burns and ‘The Miz’ face off for the first time: How does their stuff compare?

When Major League Baseball released its rosters for its Spring Breakout games in 2025, the Cincinnati Reds and Milwaukee Brewers had one of the most intriguing potential pitching matchups — the previous year’s second pick in the draft, the Reds’ Chase Burns, against the Brewers’ hard-throwing prospect Jacob Misiorowski.Both right-handers were highly touted and armed with triple-digit fastballs. That meeting was dashed for MLB Network when Burns started for the Reds in a Cactus League game just three days earlier.The dream matchup will finally come to fruition Thursday afternoon, 473 days later, when the 23-year-old Burns starts against the 24-year-old Misiorowski in the finale of a four-game series in Milwaukee.And what a difference 15 months makes. No longer a pair of promising prospects, the second-year aces enter their first faceoff as likely National League All-Stars and Cy Young contenders.What makes these two young starters special? To start, they both have stuff that’s as good as anybody else in baseball. Here’s a look at how their arsenals make Misiorowski and Burns two of the best pitchers in baseball.How did The Miz get this good, this fast?Derek VanRiper and Eno SarrisFastballsIt’s hard to go toe-to-toe with the hardest fastball in the league. Misiorowski has the highest average fastball velocity of any starter, and has also thrown the fastest pitch thrown by a starter in the pitch tracking era (105.5 mph, in literally his most recent time on the mound). He’s the only starting pitcher to throw a fastball over 103 mph, and he’s done it 63 times already.Case closed?Sure, but let’s give Burns some flowers too. Only five starters have thrown harder than him this year at 97.9 mph on the gun, and it has more vertical movement than his Brewers counterpart does.But Burns has a higher arm slot — 53 degrees to Misiorowski’s 30 degrees — so he’s expected to have that ride. His fastball has some cut, which makes it equally good against lefties and righties, but then you return to the radar gun supremacy, and you just have to smile and shrug.