Jacob deGrom—A Breakdown
Jacob deGrom. The deGrominator. The deGoat. Just some of the wicked nicknames deGrom has developed over the course of his short career. He’s on a whole different planet, another dimension some think. His year over year numbers are incredible. What we saw in his first Cy Young season was already jaw dropping, yet he continues to improve year after year after year. He’s already added a second piece of hardware to his trophy case (in the form of another Cy Young award) and there’s ample reason to believe he’s well on his way to more. Even on the wrong side of 30 — where performance begins to steadily fade for MLB players — deGrom finds himself at the top of the league. More than a few people would argue that he is the best pitcher in the league going into 2021.
Accolades
First let me outline some of his eye-popping stats. His consistency since entering the big leagues, as well as his ascent to stardom in the last handful of years, have vaulted him from mediocre prospect to household name. In 2014, deGrom hauled in the Rookie of the Year award equipped with a 2.69 ERA and 144 strikeouts in 140 innings. That ERA was enough to land him in the top 15 in the entire league (for those with at least 140 innings). 2015 brought a stat line equally impressive, and he was rewarded with his first spot in the mid-summer classic. He also finished in the top 10 in Cy Young voting. 2017 brought another Cy Young top 10 finish. Then in 2018 and 2019 he rattled off dominant performance after dominant performance each time he took the bump. With just 10 wins in 2018, deGrom still ran away with his first Cy Young award (thanks to a sub 2.00 ERA and 269 Ks). He repeated this performance in 2019 walking away with another Cy Young award — again with just 11 wins. In the COVID shortened 2020 deGrom struck out an absurd 13.8 guys per nine innings. As expected he continued to assert his presence atop award rankings last year. This is the briefest of overviews for a generational talent. It doesn’t do nearly enough justice in characterizing the storied and illustrious career of Jacob deGrom. So let’s work from the beginning and find out how exactly he worked his way here.
Minor League Career
A little over a decade ago, deGrom found himself at Stetson University. He was starting shortstop for most of his first two campaigns and it wasn’t until mid way through his junior year that he got the ball in a start. His final season at Stetson amounted to an unimpressive 4.48 ERA and a measly 56 strikeouts in 82 ⅓ innings. Despite the inexperience and mediocre track record in college, the Mets spent a 9th round pick on deGrom in 2010. Nothing about this screams top of the line ace and perennial Cy Young candidate. Moving along into deGrom’s minor league career and still no special revelation. Never was he ranked better than 10th in the Mets prospect pipeline. In a New York Mets community on SBNation from 2013:
“The long of it: deGrom is long and lean. He uses his height well, getting good extension and has an easy arm action. Fastball was only 91–94 in look, though reports have him touching 96. Labored under the humid conditions and was down to 90–92 by the end of his start… In May he used an inconsistent slider that flashed solid-average with good tilt as his primary breaking ball…The projection: 8th inning guy”
The writer clearly states that he is not a scout so take what he says with a grain of salt. I wanted to point this out because it’s incredibly hard to believe, but also an incredibly common sentiment among scouts and MLB talent evaluators. The same guy whose career is littered with accolades and stardom is the same one that started out littered with questions: questions on velocity, questions on breaking pitches, and questions on where he’d ultimately slot in with the team (if at all). Keep these numbers in mind as I progress through his career.
Jacob found himself in the minors from the middle of 2010 through the early parts of the 2014 season. Already short on live mound experience — with only a handful of starts in one season of college — deGrom was also faced with every pitcher’s worst nightmare: a torn UCL. Less than a dozen starts into his minor league career, he faced the daunting challenge of Tommy John surgery. Rehab took him out of all of 2011, further delaying his development. Prior to the torn UCL deGrom sported a 5.19 ERA, a 1.58 WHIP in Rookie ball…does this guy really have a shot at the big leagues? Perhaps the poor performance was due to the degradation of his ulnar collateral ligament.
Coming off a major surgery like Tommy John doesn’t offer the greatest prognosis. While the surgery touts a success rate north of 80%, the expectation that a pitcher will return to his previous level of performance is all but guaranteed. Fortunately for Jacob deGrom, there was no regression; in fact he elevated his game to levels he never had at any level after starting college. At the A level, deGrom quietly offered a stellar 2.51 ERA in 15 starts. A promotion to A+ led to even more impressive numbers (a 2.01 ERA in 4 starts). Bear with me as I only look at traditional stats like ERA. I understand their limitations, but at the minor league level, to keep things simple, I’m only going to dip into the surface level stats. Anyway, 2012 was the beginning of a quick ascent through the minors.
Fast forward through 2013 and you’re left with that little snippet I included earlier. You’d think that he didn’t really have the best year. However, I’d argue he had a fantastic year. First, he skyrocketed through the Mets’ system. Just 2 starts at A+, followed by 10 at AA, and 14 at AAA. Normally the jump from A+ to AA gives players the greatest challenge, yet the Mets felt comfortable not only giving deGrom a chance in AA, but also giving him a quick promotion to AAA. Maybe it had something to do with his older age (he was older than most of his peers), or maybe it had something to do with his numbers. On the surface, they don’t look too great: 4.80 ERA in AA, 4.52 in AAA. Why did he get that promotion? Well, like I mentioned earlier, the traditional stats consume the average baseball spectator. (Not like the average fan has a deep interest in minor leaguers and their stats to begin with though.)
Here’s what the Mets probably saw (in addition to the advanced analytics and scouts they have constantly monitoring minor league talent): 0.340 and 0.342 BABIP, 3.82 and 3.93 FIP. (In AA and AAA, respectively.) I’m limited by what I can evaluate deGrom on in the minors beyond the aforementioned traditional statistics, so I’m only lucky enough to utilize BABIP and FIP. What I see is a pitcher who was the victim of bad luck. BABIP hovers around 0.300 in the majors (likely a little higher in the minors because defense is a bit worse); hitters were fortunate to reach base way more than average. Maybe deGrom’s ERA was smidge higher due to this bad luck. How about FIP? FIP is on the same scale as ERA; his FIP was significantly lower than his ERA on both minor league levels. Like BABIP, FIP helps us understand the impact of defense in a pitcher’s statistics. Outcomes only under deGrom’s control — essentially the definition of FIP — were quite good, indicating that he not only proved he belonged at each level, but that he should have also seen better results in his “traditional” stats.
Next season was the first time deGrom saw big league action. But first he had another short stint in AAA. What happened there? Just what you’d expect given his advanced statistics from the year prior. His BABIP regressed (a good thing for him) to league average and his ERA dipped below 3. Easily enough for a promotion, deGrom continued to showcase his excellence at the big league level.
Velocity
Ok, so now we’ve made it all the way from deGrom’s underwhelming career in college to scorching start in the big leagues. Things get silly. He’s 26 at this point. Pitcher’s peak right around 26–27 before a steady decline in the late twenties and early thirties. One of the first things to noticeably go is velocity. Take Zack Greinke and Felix Hernandez for example. These guys were superstars in 2008, both regularly pumping their fastball into the mid and upper 90s. Over the next decade neither pitcher ever topped the same fastball velocity that they did in 2008. They started declining at ages 24 and 22, respectively. Now, they both went on to have wildly successful careers (and Greinke is still putting up respectable seasons in Houston), and both have strong cases for the hall of fame, but as expected their velocities declined. Let’s see how deGrom lines up with them (and a couple others).
In 2020 deGrom threw his fastball almost 3 mph harder than any other starting pitcher in the league over the age of 30. It was also the second hardest any pitcher, starter or reliever, has averaged over the course of a season in the last decade, and in all likelihood, of all time of anyone over the age of 30. And as the graph shows, he’s only gotten better, doing the exact opposite of what we normally see as pitchers age. What about his “offspeed”? I put that in quotes because his slider trumps a large chunk of the league’s fastballs. Clocking in at an average of 92.5 mph, it was over 2 mph harder than any other pitcher’s slider in 2020. To put that into perspective, 408 pitchers threw a 4-seam fastball at least 5% of the time, 139 of them failed to average 92.5 mph. And what’s the difference between a fastball and a slider? Only several feet of movement.
Movement
Let’s talk about movement. He’s got a howitzer fastball and slider; he must also pair that with devastating movement. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Every pitch can be characterized by its movement in two different directions — vertical and horizontal. For fastballs (and most other pitches) the vertical movement is much more telling. Every pitch drops to some extent due to gravity, even fastballs. For some pitches, like these fastballs, the less movement the better. When someone says that the fastball “rises,” they actually imply that it isn’t significantly affected by gravity. In other words, it has the least amount of vertical movement. The likes of Aroldis Chapman, Gerrit Cole, and Justin Verlander all have very little vertical movement on their fastballs. There’s a strong correlation between pitcher’s effectiveness and lack of fastball movement, or presence of “rise.” So where does Jacob deGrom come in? He must be near the top. Well, he’s close, but not where you’d expect a perennial Cy Young candidate consistently touted for his fastball to be. In 2020, 12 pitchers had a fastball with more “rise” than deGrom. But here’s where another layer comes in. A ball moves from the time it is released until the time it reaches the catcher’s mitt. What you have to remember is the ball reaches the plate quicker for some pitchers — those that throw harder — than others. The ball simply has less time to move before its path ends at the catcher’s mitt. That’s why pitchers who constantly flirt with triple digits tend to have less movement on their fastball. Yet when compared to pitcher’s of his caliber — those that throw have a similar velocity and release point — deGrom falls short. In 2020 his fastball dropped 9% more than average; in 2019, 10%; in 2018, 8% — again relative to those in the same caliber. In each of these years, that percentage never placed better than 60th among MLB pitchers. Effectively, 60 pitchers possessed a fastball better than deGrom’s when looking strictly at movement.
DeGrom is also equipped with a slider that moves less than any other slider in the league (in 2019; in 2020 he ranked seventh worst, so not as bad). Yes, you heard that right, his slider moves very little. Yet, batters constantly fall victim to the vicious bite on this pitch. It’s actually comical how absurd this pitch is. As with fastballs, there’s vertical and horizontal movement with sliders. I also mentioned that pitcher’s movements are characterized relative to peers in the same caliber as them. I want to explain what I mean by caliber. When I say caliber, I mean those that throw the slider with a velocity ±2 mph. Here’s Figure 2 showing the top 10 pitcher’s categorized by slider velocity in 2020.
What does this mean? Well first deGrom’s slider comes from another dimension, obviously. Second, because no pitcher’s average velocity is within 2 mph, there aren’t going to be many pitches in deGrom’s caliber. Sure some of Gott’s and Altavilla’s sliders are harder than 90.4 and 90.0, and some of deGrom’s sliders are slower than 92.5, but there’s probably not a ton of overlap in that 2 mph zone. So when we look at how his movement compares to his “peers,” — pitchers in his caliber — they’re aren’t many peers, because he’s on such a different level. Without getting too much into the physics, deGrom’s slider moves less because it has less time to do so. The time for it to get to the catcher’s mitt is smaller, albeit only a smidge, than all those that throw their slider slower (just like I mentioned with his fastball). Overall, strictly focusing on movement, deGrom’s slider in 2020 and 2019 only performed marginally better than average.
Jacob degrom also throws a changeup about 15–20% of the time; like his slider and his fastball, the movement is underwhelming. It’s better than average, but fails to find itself in that elite category. What I believe makes it special — as was the case with his other two pitches — is its velocity. It sat north of 90 mph. Only seven other pitchers possess this kind of changeup. It was likely due to this that hitters only managed a 0.164 batting average and 0.244 wOBA, both considerably lower than league average. In other words, in that elite category. Safe to say that despite the poor evaluations on his pitch movement, deGrom has found other ways to be elite — namely in the form of his preposterous velocity.
Command
This is obviously not an exhaustive analysis. There are probably quite a few things missing. Some might not even be quantifiable. One big thing I have failed to mention so far is control. Or more accurately command. They’re used interchangeably and that I find that criminal. “How many walks did he issue?” That’s the first question, and quite a primitive one, that would be asked when trying to define a pitcher’s control. I — as a washed up former high school athlete — could venture out to an MLB mound and give the league leader in strike percentage a run for their money. Now, would most inevitably end up about 500 feet from home plate in the third deck? Absolutely. I could have phenomenal control but pathetic command. What’s command? Command is the ability to accurately locate pitches in locations that are hardest for hitters to hit. It doesn’t matter if a pitch is 100 miles per hour and moves 4 feet if it’s down the heart of the plate, where the hitter hits best. Command involves knowledge as well as skill. Some pitches might be better placed in some spots in the zone than others, and some hitters might react to some pitches differently than others. That’s why simply throwing strikes isn’t an accurate way to develop a command profile for anything past maybe little league. But let’s try to keep things simple and generalize things because talking about command can get very complex.
Below are two figures. Figure 3 shows the average whiff rate on fastballs from 2020 by zone. Figure 4 shows the average whiff rate on fastballs from deGrom in 2020. Each figure has the strike zone, outlined in green, as well as a few inches above the zone.
You can see that deGrom is exceptional at getting hitters to miss high fastballs. To get a better idea of where deGrom normally locates his fastball see Figure 5. Not only does he get a lot of whiffs, but he frequently locates his fastball up there too. High whiff rate with a high concentration: deGrom commands the top of the zone with this fastball.
Below are two more figures. Figure 6 shows the league average whiff rate for sliders in 2020 in each zone. Figure 7 shows deGrom’s whiff rate for his slider in 2020 in each zone. Again the area outlined in green is the strike zone. I expanded the zone to incorporate the first few inches outside the bottom and right side of the zone as well.
Let’s do the same thing with the slider. In Figure 8 below, there’s a graphic for where deGrom normally locates his slider. As you can see, it’s incredibly precise and shows the same trend as we saw with his fastball. Not only does he get a ton of whiffs in the bottom right side of the zone (and slightly outside), he frequently locates his sliders there. High whiff rate and high concentration: deGrom commands the bottom right of the zone with his slider. The reason he is ice cold in some zones — as low as zero in some — is because he rarely throws his sliders there. The black boxes indicate that he never threw his slider in that location. That right there is command.
Final Thoughts
Let’s revisit that snippet I included.
“The long of it: deGrom is long and lean. He uses his height well, getting good extension and has an easy arm action. Fastball was only 91–94 in look, though reports have him touching 96. Labored under the humid conditions and was down to 90–92 by the end of his start… In May he used an inconsistent slider that flashed solid-average with good tilt as his primary breaking ball…The projection: 8th inning guy”
Really funny how things can change right? “He uses his height well…easy arm action.” Check. They got that right. Experts and scouts across the league seem to agree that Jacob deGrom has one of the most mechanically sound deliveries in the league. “Fastball was only 91–94…touching 96.” Well, his fastball averaged 98.6 mph last year. Only a handful of his fastballs dipped below 96 in all of 2020. “He used an inconsistent slider.” His slider was one of the best in the league. Sure, it didn’t have the flashy movement. But that’s only because it averaged almost 93 mph! It didn’t have time to move, it had already crossed the plate and found itself in the catcher’s mitt before it had time to drop another foot. That velocity is about what deGrom averaged on his fastball in 2013. “Labored under humid conditions…The projection: 8th inning guy.” Maybe the most blasphemous portions from the snippet. And I don’t blame the guy either. This was a common sentiment about deGrom in 2013. No one offered “potential to be a perennial superstar” in their prospect analysis. He’s now a front of the rotation anchor. An ace. And hey this guy’s not an eighth inning guy, but rather he’s a one through seven inning guy instead. In each of the three full seasons (162 games), deGrom has topped 200 innings. In 95 starts over these same three seasons, he’s failed to complete the 5th inning just seven times. You’re hard pressed to find a guy that can go out and give this kind of consistency.
So, throughout this piece I ventured out to see what makes Jacob deGrom so special. I did my best not to let confirmation bias hinder any of my research, and you can see that there are areas where deGrom doesn’t stack up to his peers. Yet, in the same token, where he’s missing in things like pitch movement (really because his pitches travel to the plate so quickly), he makes up for in his unprecedented ability to add velocity with age. Father Time is unavoidable. No pitcher, player, or athlete is immune. It’s not a question of “if,” but rather a question of “when” the inevitable decline will happen. But here deGrom is, in his enigmatic ways, adding noticeable velocity to his fastball (and slider) into his 30s. What we’re witnessing is the unimaginable, improbable, breathtaking career of Jacob deGrom. His accolades and preposterous numbers have put him on a fast track to Cooperstown, and yet he’s only a half dozen seasons into his big league career. Buckle up for another year of deGromination in 2021.
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