CHICAGO — One week before he delivered what some around the sport hailed as the most electrifying pitching performance they had ever watched, Mason Miller stood near the home dugout at Petco Park and reflected on a drastic change in scenery. He was leaning against a railing only yards away from the clubhouse where, just the previous night, he and his teammates had danced and sprayed champagne.
It had been less than eight weeks since the San Diego Padres acquired Miller in a blockbuster trade that lifted him out of the obscurity of the West Sacramento-based Athletics. And for the first time in his career, the majors’ hardest-throwing pitcher was headed to the postseason.
“I mean, it’s just an excitement I haven’t felt at this time of year,” Miller said. “Every game’s meant something for a while now. And you know that. Every game out of 162, even if it doesn’t feel like it, means the same.
“Hopefully, we can play here for some home games. That would be awesome.”
Wednesday afternoon, with the Padres staring at potential elimination from their National League Wild Card Series, Miller kept that possibility alive in the most emphatic of ways. There were other heroes in a season-saving 3-0 shutout of the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field — from the franchise third baseman who crushed a two-run homer, to the starting pitcher who achieved a measure of redemption, to the left-hander who came in and got seven big outs — but it was Miller who provided the most visceral experience.
The 6-foot-5 right-hander took the mound after Adrian Morejon, the aforementioned lefty, and pitched as if he had been transported from the future.
“I don’t think there’s been a more dominant performance from what I’ve seen,” Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla said.
“Have never seen dominance like that before,” one rival evaluator wrote in a text.
“I was laughing a little bit today,” Padres shortstop Xander Bogaerts said. “I mean, it’s not fair. Yeah, that ain’t it. It’s good to be on my side — it’s great. But as a hitter, nah. That ain’t it.”
104 MPH 🔥
Mason Miller is bringing the heat pitching on back-to-back days! #Postseason pic.twitter.com/S6TyC8G3iB
— MLB (@MLB) October 1, 2025
The Cubs had been the unfortunate recipients of a historic outing: Miller, pitching for the second day in a row, struck out five of the six batters he faced to become the first major leaguer to strike out the first eight batters faced in his postseason career. When the second of Wednesday’s victims, Cubs catcher Carson Kelly, went down looking at a 104.5 mph four-seamer that painted a far corner of the plate, it registered as more than the fastest pitch Miller had ever thrown; it was also the fastest postseason pitch by any player dating back to at least 2008, the start of the pitch-tracking era.
Imagine how hard Miller might throw if the Padres prevail in Thursday’s winner-take-all showdown and thus ensure at least one home game against the Milwaukee Brewers in the NL Division Series.
“There’s a little bit more adrenaline when you’re going out there in the postseason,” Padres catcher Freddy Fermin said through team interpreter Jorge Merlos. “If you’re a player, you’re trying to … take advantage of all the opportunities that you can. And he’s definitely doing it.”
The Padres had returned to a hostile ballpark Wednesday in the face of long odds. Since the introduction of the current postseason format in 2022, teams that lost the first game of a best-of-three Wild Card Series had gone 0-for-12 in their attempts to survive and advance. San Diego’s offense found itself in a similar rut; over their past 33 postseason innings, including the bitter end of the 2024 NL Division Series, the Padres had scored a total of one run. Adding to the pressure, the pitcher who was scheduled to start against the Cubs carried a disappointing 4.55 regular-season ERA and an even more worrisome 12.91 mark through four playoff appearances.
Then, Dylan Cease threw 3 2/3 scoreless innings in what he later called one of his sharpest outings of the year. Morejon subsequently took the mound for a showing that would confirm his status as one of the most valuable relievers in baseball. Moments after the lefty struck out Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong to end the bottom of the fourth, third baseman Manny Machado crushed a first-pitch splitter to end the Padres’ October home run drought and give them a 3-0 lead.
Then, in the bottom of the seventh, the door to the covered right-field bullpen swung open. Miller stepped through it. For the Cubs, his emergence would mark the beginning of the end.
Miller started with strikeouts of Seiya Suzuki, Kelly and Crow-Armstrong, replicating the sequence of events from his one-inning appearance a day earlier. This time, though, he kept going: Dansby Swanson was blown away to start the bottom of the eighth. Matt Shaw soon met the same fate. Finally, with his 27th pitch, Miller plunked leadoff hitter Michael Busch with a slider.
It was arguably his only miss. Including Miller’s final three strikeouts of the regular season, it ended his run of consecutive strikeouts at 11 — two shy of teammate Jeremiah Estrada’s major-league record.
“I heard somebody in the bullpen went to Estrada and shook his hand and said, ‘Hey, congratulations. Your record still stands,’” Niebla said. “But, I mean, it’s two deadly pitches, and (Miller) throws them both for strikes. He throws both of them in any count, and it just makes for a tough at-bat.”
Miller averaged 103 mph with 11 fastballs, up 1.8 mph from where he sat in the regular season. He threw 16 sliders, ranging in velocity from 87.8 to 90.5 mph. The Cubs swung at 10 of his offerings, whiffed at six and fouled off the other four.
“Changing speed like that — when you’ve got 14 miles an hour, 15 miles an hour, sometimes 16, 17 off his best pitch — that’s always going to be tough,” Crow-Armstrong said.
“It’s tough because you can’t cover both,” said Jake Cronenworth, the Padres’ second baseman and a former two-way player. “You’ve got to pick one or the other, and then when you think you’re getting one, you get the other.”
“At the end of the day, a pitch is going to be successful because it’s backed up by something else,” Niebla said. “The fastball being as good as it is, you’re able to throw as many sliders as you can. So, we gave him the freedom to do that.”
For sheer force, though, the fastball remained unmatched. Miller agreed that his final pitch to Kelly was the best four-seamer he had ever thrown. It surpassed his previous high, a 104.2 mph fastball that was logged only days after the Padres acquired him from the Athletics.
How was it humanly possible to throw so hard with such precision?
“I don’t know,” Miller said. “You kind of focus on what your lanes are, and you know, sometimes everything syncs up and the execution’s perfect. But the majority of the time, we’re not executing every single pitch exactly where we want to. Sometimes it just lines up that way.”
The Padres might come to recall a July 31 megadeal in roughly the same terms. That was the day president of baseball operations A.J. Preller surrendered one of the sport’s best prospects, shortstop Leo De Vries, and other promising talents in exchange for Miller and depth starter JP Sears.
For now, the swap seems prescient. In what remains the sport’s pre-eminent super-bullpen, Miller has lessened the sting of setup man Jason Adam’s season-ending quad injury. He has struck out 57.6 percent of the batters he has faced while wearing a Padres uniform; his 42 percent career rate in the regular season represents an all-time high among qualifying big-league relievers, just ahead of former San Diego closer Josh Hader.
Miller simultaneously has demonstrated rare versatility, pitching anywhere from the seventh inning to the ninth. Speaking with The Athletic last month, Niebla labeled him a present-day version of former Cleveland reliever Andrew Miller, the hard-throwing lefty who made four multi-inning appearances in the 2016 World Series and helped revolutionize modern bullpen usage.
Wednesday night, the coach sounded even more convinced.
“You can bring (Mason Miller) in at any part of the game to shut it down,” Niebla, a former pitching instructor in the Cleveland organization, said. “Whether it’s to shut down the rally or it’s right- and left(-handed batters), it doesn’t matter. And the ability to just not get contact is really special.
“So, yeah, I still feel the same way.”
The Padres intend to take that confidence into another do-or-die game, having staved off elimination with a brief but effective start by Cease, followed by multi-inning cameos from Morejon, Miller and closer Robert Suarez. Thursday, with 39-year-old Yu Darvish scheduled to start and starter Michael King waiting in the bullpen, Morejon, Miller and Suarez again figure to be available.
“Coming into the series, we talked about the possibility of pitching every game,” Niebla said. “They’re all in a pretty good spot.”
This would be well out of the ordinary.
This is also October. Miller knew it before he even got here.
“When the bullpen’s your strength, you’ve got to play to your strength in the playoffs,” he said that morning last week at Petco Park. “You don’t want to lose (by) not going to one of your biggest strengths.”
(Photo of Mason Miller: Brandon Sloter / Chicago Cubs / Getty Images)
