Jacob Misiorowski is a finalist for one of baseball's biggest individual awards, and he's not alone. Three other members of the World Series champion Milwaukee Brewers landed on finalist lists as well, the league confirmed this morning, a cluster of recognition that tends to follow a team that wins it all in October.
I don't have the full breakdown in front of me yet, meaning I can't tell you tonight which specific trophies each of the four is chasing or who the other three names are. What I can tell you is that this is the shape award season always takes for a champion: the roster that just hoisted the trophy shows up again and again on the ballots that get mailed out in its wake. Winning tends to travel in groups. Pitchers who carry a staff through October get remembered in November. So do the hitters who delivered in the biggest spots and the players who quietly made a good team great.
For Misiorowski specifically, this is the follow-through on a season that ended with a ring. Aces get judged on stuff and strikeouts in June, but they get judged on October starts for the rest of their careers, and a pitcher who finishes a championship year as a finalist for one of the sport's headline awards has done both. The Brewers front office spent the last day making roster business official too, handing out qualifying offers to help retain pieces of that same roster, which tells you Milwaukee isn't treating this title as a one-year accident. They're trying to build something that keeps showing up on award ballots.
What happens next for Misiorowski and his teammates is simple and a little boring by design: the voting runs its course, the awards get handed out, and baseball moves into its offseason business of free agency and roster construction. For a Brewers team that just won a World Series and now has multiple players up for individual hardware, the bigger story is what it says about the organization. Small-market teams don't usually get this much shine at once. Milwaukee earned it.
