Mets’ deGrom in Cy Young race at 7-7 with 1.81 ERA
BALTIMORE – Jacob deGrom is 30, an undisputed ace with a devastating pitch repertoire and a burgeoning ability, as he often mentions, to block out external factors in his quest for domination.
In this Mets season of disappointment paired with occasional organizational dysfunction, deGrom has methodically destroyed opponents, advanced the conversation on pitcher evaluation and forged a path to a lucrative future even as conditions went
haywire around him.
With six weeks and roughly eight starts remaining in his 2018 season, deGrom’s record sits at 7-7. He’d have to win almost every remaining outing to match the 13 wins posted by Seattle’s Felix Hernandez in 2010, the lowest win total for a starting pitcher to win a Cy Young award.
Yet deGrom this year has a way of forcing the issue, be it compelling the Mets to think about his future or altering the definition of an award-winning campaign.
“It definitely looks like a Cy Young season,” first-year Mets manager Mickey Callaway told USA TODAY. “He’s making a case for all those reasons you shouldn’t pay attention to some of the things that writers and players and coaches and GMs have valued in the past. He’s making a huge case for some of the new age thinking out there.
“You get a guy who’s 7-7 and probably the best pitcher in the league. There’s guys out there that haven’t pitched near as well as him that are 15-5. So who’s the better pitcher? The new age thinking would say deGrom. If you put those numbers in front of somebody 10 years ago, everybody would go for the guy who’s 15-5.”
The guy who happens to be 15-5 right now is Max Scherzer, the Nationals’ ace and three-time Cy Young winner. When the All-Star break arrived and deGrom had a 1.68 earned run average to Scherzer’s 2.41, he was gracious in deferring the All-Star Game start to Scherzer, who got the nod before his fans in Washington. That week, they talked shop, as pitchers do — opposing hitters, pitch repertoire and the like — but not awards.
That conversation will play out in the public eye now through November, presuming both stay on their current paths.
Atop of at least seven National League statistical leaderboards, it goes either Scherzer-deGrom or deGromScherzer. “Mad Max” leads in several classic categories, including his 15 wins. He ranks 1-2 with deGrom on strikeouts (227-195), innings pitched (1682⁄ 3- 159) walks and hits per inning (0.88-0.97) and strikeout-walk ratio (5.68-5.42).
DeGrom, however, holds significant advantages in several key categories, including ERA, 1.81 to 2.27. Digging deeper, he holds a big lead (228-194) in ERAplus, which adjusts for a pitcher’s home ballpark and league ERA. And in Fielding Independent Pitching, which zeroes in on factors within a pitcher’s control, such as home runs allowed, deGrom holds a 2.13-2.63 advantage, with Arizona’s Patrick Corbin (2.41) slotting between them.
One could argue Scherzer has endured the pressure of holding together a Nationals club with championship aspirations that has frayed in almost every area, save for the nights he starts.
Yet while deGrom’s frustrations differ from Scherzer’s, they’re similarly challenging.
As the Mets’ season dissolved — 37 losses in 54 games from mid-April to mid-June — deGrom remained indomitable. He went a month without winning, neither personally nor the team, while posting one of the best five-start stretches of his career, a 1.25 ERA and 44 strikeouts in 36 innings.
While Scherzer enjoys the fourthbest run support among qualified NL starters at 5.16 runs per game, deGrom receives the fourth worst at 3.79.
“When you have a three- or four-run lead, you can relax a little bit and every pitch doesn’t have to be so intense. He hasn’t had that luxury,” Mets catcher Devin Mesoraco says. “To do what he’s done is even more impressive.”
There’s also a certain professional emptiness driving home from work for a month without feeling you’ve contributed anything tangible to the company’s success.
“You want to win. We want to win baseball games,” deGrom says. “We went through a stretch there where we weren’t winning any of the starts that I had. It’s frustrating, whether I get the W or the team.
“Things didn’t turn out how we wanted them to. We’ve had injuries; we’ve had a lot of things. But when I take the mound, I want to put this team in the best position I can to win.”
And there’s plenty of reasons deGrom has leaped from Mets co-ace along with Noah Syndergaard to one of the game’s greatest pitchers.
Now in his fourth full major league season, deGrom says he’s developed greater conviction with his pitches with runners in scoring position. Indeed, his opponents’ batting average in those situations is an astonishing .156, compared to a .223 overall career mark.
To counteract what he calls “everyone buying into this launch-angle trend,” deGrom has laid off his sinker and in favor of throwing his four-seam fastball up in the strike zone with greater regularity. The result: just eight home runs given up after allowing 28 last year. His 0.45 homers yielded per nine innings leads baseball.
“Last year I gave up quite a bit,” he says. “I didn’t enjoy that.”
Says Mesoraco: “There isn’t a game plan he can’t execute. He can do whatever he needs to do.”
Yet in career matters, deGrom is virtually powerless. His agent, Brodie Van Wagenen, laid his client’s cards on the table over the All-Star break when he told “The Athletic” that the Mets need to lock up deGrom as a long-term building block or trade him now, with two-plus seasons remaining before free agency.
Neither happened, and so with the Mets currently without a full-time general manager after Sandy Alderson’s health-related retirement, deGrom says any action is “something we’re going to have to look at in the offseason.
“I’ve really enjoyed my time here,” he says. “I think wanting to know that we’re going in the right direction and wanting to be a part of the future is where that kind of came from — let us know if you want me around to be a part of this future. And hopefully, that’s the plan and we plan on winning.
“It was kind of saying, if the plan is to win, let’s make something happen and stay here awhile.”
A Cy Young award would certainly burnish deGrom’s future earnings. The chase resumes Friday, when Scherzer faces the Marlins while the Mets take on Phillies starter Aaron Nola, who could have a say in the award should either front-runner falter.
DeGrom gets his crack at the Phillies on Saturday.
“Once you get down to those final five starts and if he’s in the same position and Scherzer’s in the same position, those guys will start to feel that,” Callaway says. “Those guys, they have pride and they know what’s on the line.”