Jacob Misiorowski is about to turn one monster season into a massive payday.
Next week, he’ll officially win the 2026 National League Cy Young Award, capping off what the source describes as one of the great pitching seasons of this decade and one of the best in Brewers history. That honor alone will send $2.5 million his way through the pre-arbitration bonus pool created under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement. Once the rest of the bonus money is divided up based on players’ WAR totals, Misiorowski is expected to collect roughly $3.2 million in the next month.
For a player whose 2026 salary was under $800,000, that’s a huge jump.
He won’t be the only Brewer cashing in. Based on a review of the relevant WAR totals, Jackson Chourio is set to get around $500,000, while Joey Ortiz and Logan Henderson should each land roughly $300,000.
Abner Uribe is projected for about $200,000. Chourio already made $7 million in 2026 under the long-term extension he signed before his debut, but the other three were in the same salary range as Misiorowski, so these bonuses amount to major raises.
The way the system works, every team contributes an equal share - about $1.67 million - into a $50 million pool for high-performing pre-arbitration players. Milwaukee has gotten more out of that setup than any other club.
Last year, 10 Brewers received bonuses totaling more than $4.7 million. This year’s total should come in just under that figure unless Chourio makes the All-MLB team, which will also be announced next week.
Even without that, the Brewers are on track to roughly match the $4.5 million earned by eight different players in 2024. In other words, Milwaukee players are pulling in almost $3 million more per year from the system than the club pays into it.
The playoff money only adds to the haul. The Brewers won the World Series, and while playoff shares have not been announced yet, each player should receive somewhere north of $450,000.
Put the pre-arbitration bonuses and the postseason shares together, and Misiorowski’s earnings will rise by roughly six times compared to his salary. Ortiz and Henderson will see their annual pay roughly double.
There’s no direct financial windfall for the Brewers themselves from this arrangement. If anything, the bonus pool trims a little of the team’s leverage when it comes time to discuss extensions.
Sal Frelick didn’t get any new money from the pool this year, but he picked up about $740,000 over the previous two seasons, which was essentially an extra year’s paycheck. Ortiz will end up just short of $1 million across his three pre-arbitration seasons.
Misiorowski’s boost is so large that it makes his future a little less urgent to sort out, and the pool money he’s getting this year is about 50% more than the signing bonus he received when Milwaukee drafted him in 2022.
Still, the money helps inside the clubhouse. It gives young players more security and can make them a little more open to accepting the team’s decisions, whether that means optioning Henderson to the minors to start the year or moving Ortiz out of the starting shortstop role in June in favor of Cooper Pratt. For a club that doesn’t always have the same financial muscle as the biggest spenders, the system has become a real advantage.
The Brewers may be the smallest-market team in the league, but they run a payroll that outpaces what that market size would suggest. Even so, they’re never going to live with the sport’s biggest spenders.
Getting a middle reliever’s worth of bonus money from the league-wide pool each year - and, this season, more than $20 million in playoff shares to distribute - helps them avoid looking cheap and gives them a little more confidence in how they spend. It also gets players like Misiorowski paid sooner than they otherwise would be, which makes the sport a little fairer overall.
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