There’s something about distance that provides clarity. Be it from outer space, or a plane window, or two steps back, perspective is easier to find when there’s more space to seek it. It’s why Jacob deGrom might be the most vividly realized pitcher of the generation.
The two-time Cy Young winner has not pitched in the majors since April 28, 2023. In the meantime, a lot of things have happened. The Rangers won the World Series. A wave of acclaimed arms went under the knife, prompting an existential panic and whispers about significant rule changes. Players changed teams, aged, improved, declined. And the pitches, the fundamental particles and lifeblood of baseball, kept getting faster, bendier, more distinct, more elusive.
Yet when deGrom trots out of the dugout to “Simple Man” once again, it promises to feel momentous not because he missed so much, but because his right arm conjures a sort of report from way out there—a Blue Marble image for the baseball world right now.
More so than holes, the gaps in his Baseball-Reference page are starting to feel like time spent in orbit. He may not have played the game of baseball in almost 500 days, but deGrom has been moving in connection with it, an unintentional astronaut returning to put pitching in perspective.
The deGrom we think of as deGrom coalesced in 2018, shortly before his 30th birthday. From that season through his initial 30 1/3 innings with the Rangers, he operated on a plane rarely observed by starting pitchers. He posted a 2.08 ERA, 91 percent better than league average by park-adjusted ERA+, and well clear of anyone else throwing innings in bulk. His 35.6 percent strikeout rate was positively closer-ish, and his brand of dominance became the platonic ideal of the nascent pitch design era.
As The Athletic’s Andy McCullough wrote earlier this year, one of the initial insights that sprung from pitch tracking technology (like Statcast) held that “breaking balls with heightened velocity were more effective than slower breaking balls with more movement.” The principle was vividly demonstrated when the Houston Astros’ Lance McCullers Jr. threw 24 straight curveballs in the mid-80s to close out the 2017 ALCS, and the race for bat-missing stuff kicked into warp speed.
Though deGrom won the 2014 NL Rookie of the Year Award as a floppy-haired overachiever throwing his fastball 94 mph and his slider 88 mph, he became the envy of hurlers the world over by tapping into new veins of velocity. By 2020, deGrom was touching triple digits with the heater and 94 mph with a tight, impossible slider that he relentlessly placed on the same corner.
That slider, which averaged 92 mph when we last saw deGrom, still represents a pinnacle: a fleeting one, summited only in intervals between a scapula stress reaction, elbow issues, and now the second Tommy John surgery of his career. Since the end of 2019, he has thrown a grand total of 254 2/3 innings, or 3 2/3 more frames than Justin Verlander threw in the 2011 regular season.
The pitchers who have come closest to matching deGrom’s formula have done so in similar fits and starts. Rays lefty Shane McClanahan boasts the second-hardest slider among starters, but he made it only 404 2/3 innings into his MLB career before requiring his own second Tommy John surgery. Braves dynamo Spencer Strider put together two dominant seasons before going under the knife in April. Dodgers stuff maven Tyler Glasnow is on the IL with a relatively minor knock, having already eclipsed his single-season innings record with 134 frames under his belt.
The intermittent fastball approach is not by design, of course, but it’s an increasingly accepted side effect of pitch-for-pitch excellence—one Rangers general manager Chris Young acknowledged when Texas signed deGrom for five years and $185 million before the 2023 season.
“The game has gone to a quality-over-quantity type approach,” Young told ESPN’s Jeff Passan a few weeks before deGrom’s elbow gave way. “I don’t think we value quantity as much as an industry. You look at the starters we have, that quality is super high. But in order to get that quality, we’re going to have to be cognizant of not pushing them too far and throwing too many innings on them. Protecting those guys is critical, and that was part of the strategy of our offseason and how it played out.”
During this latest deGrom absence, a bigger void has opened. Where there used to be a Best Pitcher in Baseball, or at least a sturdy stage to host a compelling argument, there’s now just an existential, quasi-generational Rorschach test.
Since deGrom last pitched in the majors, Giants starter Logan Webb has fired 20 more innings than his nearest competitor, with an impressive-but-not-elite 3.16 ERA. Tigers southpaw Tarik Skubal has bloomed into an ace with a 2.66 ERA and leads MLB starters with a 26.2 strikeout-minus-walk percentage, the most deGrom-ian measure of dominance, but has only 240 2/3 innings worth of evidence. Phillies ace Zack Wheeler rests right on the middle ground, as perhaps the best answer: more effective than Webb, more proven than Skubal. None of them has won a Cy Young Award.
The closest thing to a total package may be Pirates phenom Paul Skenes, who started the All-Star Game and wields a 94 mph splinker (splitter-sinker hybrid) that could spearhead a paradigm shift for offspeed pitches in much the same way deGrom’s slider did for breaking balls. Skenes is all of 18 games into his MLB career.
Each option is rather unsatisfying, not because this is an important or necessary question to answer, but because every season it becomes more apparent that the road to pitching spectacularly is a frustrating one, with five innings between stop lights and five years between pit stops at the surgeon’s office (if you’re lucky).
As deGrom was working his way back, another wave of injuries rocked baseball. Strider, McClanahan, Shohei Ohtani (as a pitcher), Shane Bieber, Sandy Alcantara, and Eury Perez are on the shelf for all of 2024. Ohtani and McClanahan will be joining deGrom in attempting to come back from a second surgery on their UCLs, a trickier proposition than what has become the relatively routine Tommy John surgery. Dodgers starter Walker Buehler, only 30, has not yet looked right in his quest to rebound from Tommy John No. 2.
The list of success stories exists, but remains limited. It is perhaps headlined by Nathan Eovaldi, a pitcher Young and the Rangers presciently signed ahead of 2023 to extend their rotation options beyond what a roster can usually hold, a pitcher who started and won the clinching game of the World Series. Ten months later, the irony is hard to ignore. The health risk signed as depth will go down in Rangers lore for doing what Texas signed deGrom to do, deGrom’s future will rest on whether he can emulate Eovaldi’s second act, and quantity and quality will keep shadowboxing until you lose track of which is which.
When deGrom got hurt a month into his Texas tenure, already pushing 35, the understandable reaction was to mourn what could have been: to eulogize a Hall of Fame peak cut short. In the meantime, it has gotten difficult to envision a future where the great pitchers don’t have interrupted peaks. Either that, or it has gotten difficult to envision what great pitchers will look like in the future.
As he ramps up toward a return, it seems apparent that deGrom’s journey is less an individual struggle for historical standing than an expedition into the game’s not-too-distant future.
There’s no incentive for pitchers to throttle back their efforts to maximize their stuff and their payday. There’s a lot of incentive to figure out how to pair the fastest fastball possible with a hard slider. Pitchers know this. That’s why so many more of them resemble deGrom, scars and all.
Though he may yet be remembered as a thwarted prodigy, deGrom’s next act could be momentous. Certainly, as Chris Sale guns for his first Cy Young at age 35, a 36-year-old deGrom cannot be written off. There’s a train of thought by which you could pronounce deGrom, who has looked like his old self in his minor-league rehab starts, the best pitcher in the league the moment he is activated.
At the most basic level, he will be trying to throw 100 mph fastballs and evade major-league bats and prevent runners from reaching base at all. He will be trying to throw as many innings as he can, too, but mostly the first thing.
Those of us watching will undoubtedly see a longer arc in that first down-and-away dart. Half the sport is chasing deGrom to the outer limits of what is possible, and every time he whips another slider at 92 mph, he exerts more pull. Maybe there’s a limit out there somewhere. But if Jacob deGrom hasn’t yet hit it, there will be no reason to turn back now.
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