A Brief List of Pitchers I Believe Could Knock an Apple off My Head Without Maiming Me

As baseball, like a bear, emerges from hibernation, the Milwaukee Brewers graced us with a delightful little token:

Would you let The Miz throw a fastball at your head? pic.twitter.com/5Ekr848IdD

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) February 24, 2026

That’s Brewers right-hander Jacob Misiorowski knocking an apple off a teammate’s head from 60 feet, six inches away.

This video has a little bit of everything. It’s staged creatively. It showcases the talent of an elite player. It references William Tell, which is encouraging in an era when the kids can’t read. I’m pleased that at least one person in Maryvale has heard of an opera. (Or that TikTok challenge where women knock a Solo cup off their partner’s head with a shoe.) And it’s fun and whimsical, evocative of the Guys Being Dudes spirit of early spring training.

OK, fine, I’ll watch the Mariners commercial where Brendan Ryan does a pretty solid Robert De Niro impression. I’ve only seen it 100,000 times:

The thing about the Miz video is that it’s not entirely real. I saw people online saying it’s AI, probably just because that’s the shorthand for inauthenticity these days. Upon close inspection, the seams in the video start to show; you can see the clouds move backwards if you’re looking closely, and the target player’s left shoe phases in and out, like it would in a chroma key composite. MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy confirmed after the fact that the Misiorowski video was accomplished with clever editing.

Even so: First of all, this is pretty slick work for a baseball team’s marketing arm. And second, it doesn’t matter that the video is a special effects shot; it tells a story that’s meant to evoke an emotional response. This it does effectively. If watching Miz knock an apple off a Cooper Pratt’s head doesn’t make you smile, you’re made of stone.

Like, the old Evan Longoria Gillette commercial is still cool even though that’s not real:

(This commercial might be fake, but almost this exact thing happened to me a while back. I was interviewing future Orioles pitcher Thomas Eshelman while his teammates were taking infield practice. I had my back to the diamond and Eshelman grabbed an errant throw that was going to hit me in the back. Most exciting moment of my life.)

Anyway, the other way I know this video is doctored is that Miz hit the apple without braining his buddy on the stool. Misiorowski is a prodigious talent, one of the most exciting pitchers in the league, possessed of skills the average baseball fan could not have fathomed 10 years ago.

But would I let him throw a baseball — even at less-than-max effort — at a target on my head, without even wearing a batting helmet? Never in a million years. People have literally died from taking a fastball off the unshielded noggin before. A pitch to the back of the head is how James Earl Jones went blind in The Sandlot.

And not to be glib, but Misiorowski does not have the kind of command that would lead me to believe he could hit the apple without dynamiting my cerebellum. Misiorowski’s triple-digit fastball and furious mid-90s slider got him named to the All-Star team after just five big league starts; his iffy command got him knocked out of Milwaukee’s rotation by the end of the regular season. Among 287 pitchers with at least 60 innings pitched in 2025, Misiorowski was 269th in walk rate.

In short, I wouldn’t let Misiorowski try this stunt on me unless I had a world-class neurosurgeon on call.

That raises the obvious question: Is there anyone I would allow to try to knock an apple off my head?

I want to answer this question, at least at the start, with some kind of empirical filter. I don’t know, offhand, which of the hundreds of professional pitchers have innate steadiness of hand under pressure. Or, for that matter, which ones secretly take pleasure in bloodshed and would hit me in the head on purpose just to watch my skull crumple.

In 2025, 402 pitchers threw at least 40 innings in the major leagues. There’s no perfect proxy for command, so I’m considering five different numbers, a mix of basic ratios and advanced analytical models.

First: HBP%. A pitcher’s target varies pitch-by-pitch, and is not always easy to identify even with the benefit of hindsight and video. What we do know is that with very few exceptions, the target is not the batter. If a pitch strikes the batter, we can safely assume that he missed his mark by greater than the acceptable margin of error for a William Tell stunt.

Second: Unintentional walk rate. Great command doesn’t always line up perfectly with a low walk rate, but it’s a proxy I feel pretty good about. Reputation-wise, who’s the best command pitcher of the past 50 years. Greg Maddux, right? Among pitchers with 1,000 or more innings in the divisional era, Maddux isn’t no. 1 in league-adjusted walk rate, but he is no. 12.

Third: First strike percentage. Pitchers want to work from ahead in the count. That means either pounding the strike zone early, or throwing something that looks tempting in order to induce the hitter to chase. Even pitching outside the zone in that fashion requires command.

The final two numbers I’m looking at are PitchingBot’s command score and Location+. With multiple empirical approaches, you might think I’d be inclined to pick a favorite and run with it, but not in this case. With my noggin on the line, I’m going with a belt-and-suspenders approach.

Out of the original 402-pitcher sample, 82 are average or better in all five categories. That’s a start, but we can tighten the sample a little: Walk rate down to 6% or less, botCmd up to 60 or more, Location+ up to 105 or better.

That cuts the list to 18 pitchers, which is more manageable:

I immediately noticed that while Bryan Woo made this cutoff, George Kirby didn’t. He had a down command and control year by his (and perhaps only his) standards: a 5.5% walk rate and a frankly unacceptable seven hit batsmen out of 524 batters faced. I take my brain too seriously to allow a wild man like that within 60 feet of it.

From here, I can start being subjective and knocking pitchers off the list. Robert Suarez throws 98 mph and up, and opponents hit .155 off his four-seamer last season. That says to me that the pitch has late life I’m just not comfortable with when the difference between a haircut and a concussion is so narrow.

I love Andrew Kittredge as a pitcher, but I would not turn my back on him for a second with his casual, slingy delivery and sinker-heavy repertoire. In fact, if anyone throws a sinker at my head, rather than a four-seamer, I’m turning around and charging the mound in the unlikely event I survive the experience. That eliminates Steven Matz, as well as Tyler Rogers.

Baseball’s pre-eminent submarine pitcher might have the best command in the whole league, but his unique underhand delivery means the ball would be attacking the apple from below. I’ve got a gigantic head with a kind of protuberance at the back of my skull; I don’t see how Rogers can hit the apple without hitting me from that arm angle.

After narrowing the list down further (Kyle Hendricks retired, Spencer Schwellenbach is hurt, Miles Mikolas ate a live lizard once and I’m never gonna all the way trust him after that), I came up with six pitchers whom I’d be relatively comfortable with throwing in a William Tell situation. Here they are in reverse order.

Woo and Logan Webb are on my list for similar reasons. They’re both high-volume finesse-first aces who have shown themselves to be trustworthy in big-game situations. If I had to chose from between the two, I’d pick Webb just because his playoff record is better, but I think either one could remove the apple from my head without removing my head from my neck.

My fourth-place pitcher is Janson Junk, who had a big 2025 based almost entirely on not walking anyone. I wrote about Junk last month; that’s basically all he had going for him. He didn’t strike anyone out, he let up a decent amount of hard contact, and he only kept the ball in the yard because loanDepot park is the size of Rhode Island. But the man can hit a target, and that’s good enough for me.

Third place: Chris Martin. I think Martin’s a bit underrated over his career. He got a late start, he’s never been a proper closer, he doesn’t throw hard or strike that many batters out. Plus, his height makes him an odd pitcher to watch and he has the same name as a singer people like to make fun of.

But out of 2,477 pitchers who have thrown at least 200 innings in the Wild Card era, Martin has the lowest career walk rate of the lot: 3.3%. No. 1! Lower than Maddux, Dan Quisenberry, Mariano Rivera, Brad Radke, Koji Uehara, any great command pitcher since 1969. If he kills me, it’d probably be my fault.

No. 2: Jacob deGrom. Maybe he’s not at the peak of his powers anymore, but even slightly over-the-hill deGrom is the king of athletic repeatability. Even when he was throwing 100 mph routinely, his command was impeccable, and even at 37, he still hardly ever makes mistakes.

But the no. 1 pitcher I’d trust to get that apple off my head is Ranger Suárez. Suárez is a terrific command-and-finesse lefty who throws every pitch like he’s trying to knock an apple off a person’s head. Suárez’s command numbers are world-class on their own, but his performance in high-pressure situations makes me trust him more than any other pitcher in the league to hit a small target with my health on the line.

Over his last couple seasons in Philadelphia, it became a cliché to describe Suárez as having a “slow heartbeat,” but I don’t know how else to describe the way he casually carved up opposing lineups en route to a 1.48 career ERA in 11 postseason outings. If he can enter Game 5 of the 2022 NLCS with one out in the ninth and the go-ahead run on base in wet, freezing conditions, and get out of the jam on two pitches, I feel quite confident he can hit a piece of fruit from the mound.

Not that I’m volunteering to sit for such an attempt in real life. That’s why we have special effects.