At 97 mph, deGrom races time

The 37-year-old is reminding people just how dominating he was before a repeat Tommy John surgery.

The mound is his personal mountain. Once he gets on top of it, he’s fine. More than fine, actually. The air is never too thin and the view is pretty good. Jacob deGrom won two Cy Young Awards and a Rookie of the Year Award with the Mets. Now that he’s returned to that promontory, he is that pitcher again.

The treacherous part is the climb. In a four-year span beginning in 2021, deGrom started only 39 major league games. He had Tommy John surgery on his elbow for the second time. Now he’s 37 and it’s almost like the new ligament is like a small child. DeGrom is taking it to new ballparks, showing it the sights, and transporting himself back to different days. He is 8-2 with the Texas Rangers, and if he goes four-and-two-thirds innings in his next start, he will hit the 100-inning mark for the first time since 2019. Several folks are surprised to see deGrom back in the saddle because they forgot about him. Now that he’s there, few are surprised by what he’s doing.

DeGrom, 37, ranks fourth in American League ERA (2.48), second in WHIP (0.881), and fourth in batting average-against (.189). But then he’s the leading active pitcher in ERA and WHIP, and he ranks fourth alltime in hits per inning.The first three are Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax and Sid Fernandez, all of whom had to figure out where the plate was. DeGrom never had that problem. He’s the active leader in strikeouts-per-walk. Through his first ten starts of 2021, DeGrom had 100 strikeouts and had given up four runs. He had six hits himself.

DeGrom, Addie Joss and Ed Walsh are the only pitchers in history with a lifetime WHIP under 1.000. Joss’ career ended in 1910, Walsh’s in 1917.

The Rangers, who won the World Series two years ago while deGrom was rehabbing, have begun using bats made of angel hair. They are 13th in runs scored, but their starting pitchers lead all of baseball with a 3.26 ERA. Turning their season around has been as laborious as getting a battleship to do a 360, but Texas is only a game-and-a-half out of the final wild-card spot. If they make the playoffs they can turn over Game 1-2 of any series to deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, both members of the Double Tommy John club. Eovaldi’s WHIP is 0.808. So this isn’t just a ceremonial return. There’s something on the line for the club that gave deGrom a blind-faith, five-year, $185 million deal that pays him $38 million this season. And so deGrom pursues a rare moment, like a guy who runs to the counter when the DMV calls his number.

In his last start deGrom gave the Orioles no hits through seven innings. The game was in Baltimore, but even the home fans were on his side, or maybe just disgusted by the Orioles. Colton Cowser led off the home eighth by dribbling a single through the infield, and deGrom was done. “Dang, I wanted that,” deGrom said, but he knows what real disappointment is, and this isn’t that. In June he was 4-0 with a 1.07 ERA.

Manager Bruce Bochy did not let deGrom get through seven innings until his fourth start of the season. In that game deGrom held the Dodgers to three hits and still lost. Houston’s Hunter Brown has been the league’s best pitcher this season, and deGrom beat him, 1-0, on May 15.

There’s a lot of talk about the way deGrom has changed his game, that he’s throttling down because he isn’t hitting 100 mph anymore. He isn’t quite averaging a strikeout per inning, but actually his fastball still checks in at 97 most nights. He was always a high fastball, low slider pitcher who had a nice changeup as a kid. He is mixing in a few more curves, but the tool kit looks the same. Maybe he’s trying to be more efficient, looking for quick outs. Chris Young is the Rangers’ general manager and was a major league pitcher for 13 years. “I wish I knew how it felt to throw 97 and make it look as easy as he does,” Young said.

No doubt deGrom wishes he’d known it earlier. He was a shortstop at Stetson College in Florida, sometimes a defensive replacement. He once told the relievers that he had the best arm on the team, so the coaches put him to the test in a bullpen session. He convinced them, and became a closer and then a starter, and he spent one memorable day matching heat with Chris Sale, who was at Florida Gulf Coast at the time. Sale’s team won, 3-1, but deGrom smashed a homer off Sale during a rematch in the Atlantic Sun tournament. It was deGrom’s only longball of his college career.

The Mets picked deGrom in the ninth round in 2010, and he almost immediately had his first Tommy John surgery. But five years later he was beating the Dodgers in Games 1 and 5 of a five-game Division Series. There’s no telling what history deGrom could have written in 2021, if not for a forearm strain that kayoed him after 15 starts. He had a microscopic WHIP of 0.554, which translates to a little over one baserunner every two innings, and he gave up 40 hits in 92 innings. Roll that one around in your brain for a while.

But there were other injuries that kept deGrom off the mountain, and he signed with the Rangers after the 2022 season. Before his seventh start, the same ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow blew out again.

There was a time when a repeat TJ surgery was supposed to be a ticket to the golf course. Eovaldi bucked that trend and is better than ever. Kris Medlen, Brian Wilson and Brandon Beachy did not. According to the analytics site Fangraphs, there is too much conflicting data to believe any conclusions, which means that second Tommy John surgeries will continue.

The upshot is that Tommy John himself should be in the Hall of Fame, but that’s been true for a couple of decades. At 32, John seemed done. He agreed to become Dr. Frank Jobe’s guinea pig in 1974. Jobe took a tendon and transferred it to the elbow to replace the bad ligament. John pitched until he was 46, wound up with 288 wins, had three 20-win seasons and was a Cy Young Award runnerup twice. In 14 postseason appearances all told, he had a 2.65 ERA. Because John was either desperate or daring enough to let Jobe test his theory, untold thousands of pitchers on all levels have stretched their careers and made millions. As of last year, over 36 percent of all major league pitchers were Tommy John patients at some point. A creative way to honor this game-altering moment would be to put John and Jobe on the same Cooperstown plaque.

DeGrom has 92 wins at age 37. His legacy will be up to the storytellers and maybe his contemporaries, all of whom climbed more mountains, none of which reached more peaks.

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