Just how good is Jacob deGrom’s peak? Elite even among the elite

By the time they’re Jacob deGrom’s age, most starting pitchers see a darkness at the end of the tunnel. Their career mortality presents itself, usually in the guise of diminished velocity and introspection about one’s legacy.

For deGrom on Friday, there was no need for such reflection.

DeGrom is coming off another superlative season, even if this one didn’t end in a Cy Young like the previous two. At an age when most pitchers are adapting to losing a mile per hour on their fastball, deGrom was adding one, throwing harder than ever before. Asked if he could do that over a full season in 2021, he only chuckled: “I think I’ll be pretty close.”

DeGrom spoke of feeling better now physically than he did when he first came into the majors, belatedly as a 25-year-old with little prospect pedigree.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “But I almost feel better than when I first came in. First coming up, I was constantly working on my delivery. I think I figured out a routine to try to stay as smooth as I can and I feel good. I think I can compete at this level for quite a bit longer.”

For the National League, that last sentence is a harbinger. Years down the road, deGrom’s Hall of Fame candidacy might very well hinge on how long “quite a bit longer” lasts. He’s thrown fewer than 1,200 innings through his age-32 season — fewer than any Hall of Fame starter outside of Dazzy Vance. (Even Babe Ruth had more innings at this point in his life than deGrom.)

But let’s put that aside and focus on the other part of deGrom’s sentence. How good exactly is “this level” for the right-hander?

Because the conversation about longevity belies the magnitude of deGrom’s current peak performance. While in 2020 he didn’t become the third pitcher to capture three straight Cy Young awards, deGrom did become just the eighth pitcher to win twice and finish in the top-three within a three-year span.

Let’s look more closely at these last three years for deGrom. How do they compare historically to some of the best peaks in major-league history?

In doing so, I’m going to have to treat the 2020 season like something approximating a normal season. I get that it wasn’t, though one could also make the point that deGrom might have indeed merited that third Cy Young had he been given an additional 20 starts to showcase his stuff. He himself hinted at that Friday.

“I think a couple starts did hurt me,” he said about the Cy Young race he lost to Trevor Bauer. “I’d like to think it would be something different (in a full season).”

However, deGrom was on pace to reach seven wins above replacement (according to FanGraphs) for the third straight year. Just nine pitchers in the live-ball era had done that previously:

Let’s make deGrom look even more elite. In each of the past three years, deGrom has posted an ERA+ of at least 160; that means his ERA was at least 60 percent better than the league average (adjusted for his home ballpark) that season. How many other guys have done that three straight years? In the live-ball era, it’s headier company, beyond the reaches of pitchers such as Newhouser, Roberts and even Gibson:

DeGrom’s worst ERA+ in the past three years is 169 in 2019. If we make that the baseline, then Grove, Clemens and Martínez fall off the list, and DeGrom’s just the fifth pitcher in the past century to have three straight seasons at least as good as his 2019. Only Johnson did it in his 30s, like deGrom — perhaps instructive since the lefty was as good in his fourth decade as any pitcher in the sport’s history.

It should be noted that everyone else on these lists is a Hall of Famer, aside from the active Kershaw and the, sigh, complicated Clemens.

In fact, deGrom’s seven-year career taken as a whole is on par with seven-year peaks of Hall of Famers Early Wynn, Bob Lemon and John Smoltz, as well as notables such as Dwight Gooden, Felix Hernández and CC Sabathia. (If we’re kind to deGrom and extrapolate his 60-game 2020 performance out to 162, he moves ahead of those guys and occupies a grouping with Tom Glavine, Nolan Ryan and David Cone.)

All this is to say deGrom is in the midst of what is not just a Hall of Fame peak, but a peak Hall of Fame peak — elite even among the elite.

It’s frightening for the rest of the league the way he upgraded even at 32 in 2020, throwing harder than ever before, and with ease. I wrote last year that deGrom “pitched as if on an updated operating system in 2020, one that fixed whatever nebulous bugs existed and ran everything just a pinch faster than before.” On Friday, he mentioned playing around with his curveball, already good enough to be most guys’ best secondary but currently sitting a distant fourth overall in deGrom’s repertoire.

He was forthright, as always, about his intentions for 2021. Some pitchers dance around naming personal goals; deGrom doesn’t pretend.

“(The Cy Young) is definitely a goal of mine,” he said. “The goal for me is to be the best pitcher I can be, and that’s going to help us win baseball games. Ultimately, the team goal is to win the World Series. You still set personal goals, and my goal is to win another Cy Young. “

There’s no reason to bet against him. At 32, deGrom was as good as ever. And though he did allow for a second of contemplation about his future, he shut it down pretty quickly.

“You never know how long you get to play this game, and every time I’m able to put this uniform on I’m thankful for that,” he said. “I wouldn’t say the window is closing.”

(Photo: Alex Trautwig / MLB via Getty Images)