DL Hall’s four pitches turned Misiorowski’s final runner into two outs

Freddie Freeman fouled off DL Hall’s 88.7 mph slider with a 1–1 count in the fifth. Hall followed with a 97.1 mph sinker low inside the recorded vertical zone. Freeman hit it at 83.9 mph on the ground, and Brice Turang, Cooper Pratt and Jake Bauers completed a double play.

Those four pitches were Hall’s entire outing in Milwaukee’s 2–1 NLCS Game 1 victory over the Dodgers at American Family Field on October 11. He entered with one out, Mookie Betts at first and the teams tied at 1. Betts was Jacob Misiorowski’s runner; Hall stranded him and recorded the final two outs of the inning.

The result came through contact and defense, with no missed swings and no strikeout. Its importance was the two-out return from one completed plate appearance, rather than a large sample demonstrating a new pitch mix or a lasting change in Hall’s performance.

Three sinkers and one slider

Hall began with a 96.1 mph sinker for a called strike, then put a 96.6 mph sinker below the recorded zone for a ball. The slider produced the foul, and the final sinker completed the sequence. The sinkers averaged 96.6 mph across three pitches. One useful breaking ball connected the taken pitches to the ground-ball finish.

His comparison sample contains 965 physical pitches in 46 regular-season relief appearances for Milwaukee, from March 26 through September 27. Sinkers accounted for 36.1% of that record and averaged 95.6 mph. The Game 1 share was three of four pitches, or 75.0%, which describes one batter rather than evidence of a revised season strategy.

Hall’s regular-season relief record included seven pitch classifications. Only the sinker and slider appeared here. Four pitches cannot establish that he abandoned his other options, and their absence should remain a sample limitation. The selection chart retains those season types at zero for this outing so the denominator stays complete.

One inherited runner, one ball put into play

Freeman attempted to hit two pitches and missed neither. The single ball put into play was below the 95 mph hard-hit threshold, while Hall’s season comparison included 44 hard-hit balls among 134 measured contacts. One grounder supplies a documented outcome, not a reliable new contact-quality rate.

The final pitch crossed at about 1.85 feet, above Freeman’s recorded 1.71-foot lower boundary for this sequence. Its low location is visible in the diagram, but the tracking record cannot establish Hall’s target or whether Freeman expected another sinker. The official result supplies the defensive sequence and the two outs.

Hall was credited with the win after Milwaukee went ahead in the bottom of the fifth. That scoring credit does not mean his four-pitch appearance explains the entire team result. Abner Uribe, Aaron Ashby and Trevor Megill still had four innings to protect, and Los Angeles placed runners aboard in both the sixth and ninth.

The record supports a narrow, useful finding: Hall acquired a strike, changed speed and induced the double play that removed Misiorowski’s remaining threat. A larger future sample would be needed to assess whether his sinker speed or contact results had changed beyond this single confrontation.