Brewers pitcher blames Angel Stadium's deteriorating mound after upset loss

Jacob Misiorowski walked off the mound at Angel Stadium on Sunday afternoon having just surrendered a two-run homer to Wade Meckler in the second inning—a pitch that would ultimately decide the game and hand the Brewers an unexpected loss to a rebuilding Angels team. The Milwaukee ace had otherwise pitched well: seven innings, two hits, ten strikeouts, one walk. By any reasonable measure, it was a solid outing. But Misiorowski wasn't interested in the box score. He was thinking about the ground beneath his feet.

In the postgame interview, Misiorowski described the mound as among the worst surfaces he'd ever worked from in his career. The dirt was dry, compacted hard as concrete. He'd asked the grounds crew to work on it multiple times—he said twice, then corrected himself to three times—and while they'd managed to improve it somewhat, the fundamental problem never went away. "It was awful," he said. "It was probably one of the worst mounds I've had. It was dry; it was rock hard."

But Misiorowski was careful not to let his frustration curdle into excuse-making. "It is what it is and you can't blame it on that," he said. "I got to do my job." The distinction mattered to him—acknowledging a real problem while accepting responsibility for his performance. Still, his comments opened a window onto a larger issue that has haunted Angel Stadium for years: the facility itself is aging, and the infrastructure is showing it.

This wasn't the first time a player had complained about conditions at the Anaheim ballpark. Earlier in the season, the stadium had closed an entire seating section due to a pest infestation. Pitcher Yusei Kikuchi had previously criticized the aging infrastructure, pointing to basic amenities that were broken or missing—he'd specifically mentioned a non-functional air conditioner in the weight room. These weren't isolated gripes. They painted a picture of a facility that wasn't being maintained at the standard expected of a major league venue.

The timing of Misiorowski's comments reignited a familiar conversation among Angels fans: the state of the stadium had become a symbol of what many viewed as negligent ownership. The team was in the midst of a rebuilding phase, and on Saturday—the day before Misiorowski's start—the Angels had scratched starting pitcher José Soriano from the lineup. The front office released a statement explaining the move was precautionary, citing the possibility of a trade ahead of Monday's deadline. Few teams had signaled they were sellers more aggressively than the Angels this season.

Angels starter Walbert Ureña, who helped lead the shutout effort, made no similar complaints about the mound. Some fans wondered aloud whether Misiorowski was simply looking for an explanation for an uncharacteristically rough outing—though his overall numbers suggested otherwise. On paper, the NL Central-leading Brewers should have rolled past a rebuilding Angels team. Instead, they'd lost the series finale, though they'd won the first two games of the three-day stay in Anaheim.

Baseball has a way of humbling its stars when they least expect it. For Misiorowski, that reckoning came on a mound that, by his account, was barely fit for the job it was meant to do.