The Jacob deGrom Experience Is A Worrying Thing

When the Texas Rangers signed Jacob deGrom to an incentive-laden free agent deal that would pay him at least $185 million over at least the next five seasons, they knew that he was shrinking. He is notably not declining, neither in the way that pitchers in their mid-30s tend to decline nor by any objective measure. When deGrom has been healthy enough to pitch in recent years, he has been not just the best starting pitcher in baseball, but historically, preposterously dominant. The worrying part is that those seasons have been getting shorter and more fraught, and in such foreboding ways.

This is the broader conceptual challenge that deGrom has represented for years now. He is and has for some time been off effectively the map; at the risk of stating the obvious, when enough about a player is this unprecedented, there isn’t any useful precedent to assess him against. In 2021, deGrom put up a 1.08 ERA and a 0.55 WHIP over his first 15 starts, striking out more than 45 percent of the hitters who came to bat against him. Then he didn’t throw another big league pitch for more than 12 months. And then he came back and was more or less exactly as dominant—his (astonishing) 1.1 BB/9 and 14.3 K/9 figures were the same in both truncated seasons, and batters swung and missed at 21.1 percent of deGrom’s pitches in 2022; no starting pitcher with more than 50 innings of work even topped 17 percent in that category. All of which is to say that figuring out what deGrom might do next season, or in any subsequent season, has as much to do with wishcasting as it does with projection. If you had to take a guess at a starting pitcher who might be worth the kind of contract that deGrom signed, a passably healthy Jacob deGrom would be a fine answer. But it would still very much be a guess.

It’s not a completely blind one, though. The Rangers have their own reasons for taking this particular risk, one of which is that their ambitious in-house program to limit injuries among their young pitchers really, really did not work. All those scuppered prospects—at Fox Sports, Jake Mintz noted that of the 22 pitchers that the team drafted in the first five rounds between 2013 and 2020, only five have even pitched in the bigs—meant the organization needed to find starting pitching on the free-agent market if it was going to find it at all. While none of the free agent pitchers that the Rangers brought in share deGrom’s towering and harrowing combination of risk and reward, all of them—last year’s big acquisition Jonathan Gray and this year’s trio of deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, and Andrew Heaney—have struggled to stay healthy. None made it to 130 innings pitched in 2022, but the team’s broader gamble here is easy enough to see. If the Rangers can manage to keep these pitchers healthy next year, or just notably healthier, the rotation should be pretty good. That this statement is somewhere in the neighborhood of saying “if Josh Jung develops the ability to function as…