The Thrill and Melancholy of Jacob deGrom and the Mets – The Wall Street Journal

DeGrom pitched Wednesday night, against the Boston Red Sox. In his prior start, versus Washington, the right-hander threw a two-hit shutout in which he struck out 15 batters, a career high. The game before that, against Colorado, he had 14 strikeouts, including nine in a row. Entering the game against Boston, deGrom had 50 strikeouts in his first four starts, a major-league record to begin a season. He was amid an astonishing April, even for him. 

What was especially stirring about deGrom’s prior two outings, versus Washington and Colorado, was that the Mets actually won both games, including one in which they came from behind. If there is a theme to deGrom’s major-league career, now in its eighth season, it is his consistent dominance, which is regularly undercut by morbid offensive support from his own club. DeGrom won the Cy Young Award in 2018 and 2019 as the National League’s finest pitcher, and he did it in seasons in which he led the league in earned-run average, and the next year, strikeouts, and yet he still finished with pedestrian-looking 10-9 and 11-8 records, because the Mets lineup so chronically underwhelmed. 

On Wednesday night, the local telecast on SNY offered up a sobering statistic: 33 times in deGrom’s career, he has given up zero runs, or just one run, and not won the game—an ignominious achievement that has happened to him eight more times than anyone in baseball over the same period. DeGrom is a historic talent, but the regular failure of the Mets to ignite during his starts has given his career a kind of melancholy. He is a Ferrari, being asked to run on vegetable oil. 

Despite this—or maybe, in part, because of it—deGrom Day is riveting theater, as must-see as sports gets in 2021. When deGrom is pitching, plans are set aside or ignored, and the tall man (deGrom is 6 foot 4) almost always delivers on his end. Versus Boston, deGrom began the game by striking out the Red Sox leadoff hitter on a rippling 101 mph fastball, and retired the side on a crisp 12 pitches. At a time when baseball is wrestling with pace of play and long, dull games, deGrom is a crackle of efficiency. Step to the fridge to get a beer, and you could miss three outs. 

In the bottom half of the first, I called the legendary New Yorker writer and fiction editor Roger Angell, whose foray into baseball writing began in 1962 with the “grotesque early sufferings” of the expansion Mets under Casey Stengel (“a walking pantheon of evocations,” Angell wrote of the aging Stengel), eventually reaching a point of such stature and admiration in the sport that, in 2014, Angell was honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame. Angell is now 100 years old, and his eyesight is challenged, but he still locks in for the drama of deGrom Day.

“There’s something very intense about him, but it’s effortless intensity,” Angell told me. “There’s no grunting or groaning. His pitches up in the 100s are just so surprising, because the pitch comes so quickly, and from normal effort. He’s immensely powerful, but it doesn’t show itself much.”

I noted the 41 on the sleeve of deGrom’s jersey, a patch which the Mets are wearing this season to honor Tom Seaver, who died last August. Angell had known Seaver well. Did he see any comparison?

“Well, aside from their fabulous efficiency, I don’t see much comparison, because Seaver was essentially a drop-down pitcher,” Angell said. “He went straight down—that was his power; his knee would strike the dirt. DeGrom’s is just very simple motion. I don’t know where this enormous speed comes from. He’s strongly built, but he does not look overpowering. But he is. The amazing thing is that he’s getting faster.”

He is indeed getting faster. As the Journal’s Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson noted earlier this month, deGrom’s average velocity is climbing at a career point in which pitchers are usually learning how to be craftier, and less reliant on speed. One theory is that DeGrom is a late bloomer: he also played shortstop in college, and in his first season in the minors, he hurt his arm and had Tommy John surgery, missing a season and a half. DeGrom didn’t throw 140 innings in a season until he was 25 years old, and the result is a delayed career arc that, as Beaton and Robinson humorously theorized, resembles F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character of Benjamin Button. DeGrom appears to be aging in reverse, routinely hitting three digits on the radar gun.

Against Boston, he was very good, but not his best. In the second inning, the Red Sox tagged him for a pair of doubles and a run, and while deGrom stopped the bleeding there, New York couldn’t score at all off Boston’s Nick Pivetta or his relievers, triggering another doleful night for the Mets faithful. A start like what deGrom delivered—six innings, three hits, one run, nine strikeouts, one walk—should be more than enough to get a win, most of the time. Once again, it was not. In Metsworld, the frustration slipped on like an old sweater. 

“He has had every reason over the last few years to throw teammates under the bus, and has not done it once,” the Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen said late in the contest.

Sure enough, in his postgame comments, deGrom—whose 2021 record now stands at 2-2, with a 0.51 ERA and 59 strikeouts, with opponents batting .163 against him—blamed himself for the lone run (“Just wasn’t able to make pitches when I needed to”) and declined to point a finger at anyone besides himself. The ace remained a diplomat. This was just the way it had gone, as it had gone before. Another deGrom Day had passed, and the wait for the next had begun. 

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com