Jacob deGrom had one of the greatest, silliest Cy Young seasons ever

It’s easy to use statistics to talk about Jacob deGrom’s season in the abstract. There hasn’t been a Cy Young-winning starting pitcher with a better ERA in a full season since Bob Gibson in 1968. That sounds gorgeous, and it is, but it’s still abstract. For every nine innings deGrom pitched in 2018, he allowed 1.74 earned runs. That seems impressive, but allowing exactly 1.74 earned runs in a game isn’t exactly something that pitchers usually do. Dumb it down for me, please.

Try this then: In deGrom’s worst start of 2018, he allowed four runs in six innings. It’s the only time he allowed four runs in a start. It’s so, so easy for a starting pitcher to allow a bloop and a blast in one inning, followed by two doubles and a single in another, without anyone wondering what’s wrong. Allowing a bloop and a blast is what pitchers do. Sometimes they nibble on a 3-2 pitch, and sometimes their defense can’t make the great play that will bail them out. Happens. Oh, my, how it happens.

Except it didn’t happen to deGrom. In 29 out of 32 starts, deGrom threw a quality start (6+ innings pitched, 3 or fewer earned runs), and that’s remarkable, but it still undersells him. We’ll have to invent a new stat, a step up. Instead of the quality start, let’s search for the dominant start, in which a starter throws at least seven innings with two runs or fewer allowed. deGrom did this in 18 out of his 32 starts. Only two starters had more games with seven innings pitched period. deGrom had more starts with seven innings pitched than the Brewers.

That’s not enough, though. We need to invent another new metric, the badass start, which is when a starter throws at least eight innings with one run or fewer. deGrom had five of them. Twenty-two different MLB teams didn’t have as many. The Brewers and Rangers didn’t have any.

Anything better than the badass start is a shutout. deGrom didn’t have one of those — although he did have a complete game with no earned runs allowed — but that’s just the modern game. By every metric, advanced or traditional, deGrom dominated in a way that we might see only a couple of times every decade, if not a couple of times every other decade, if not a couple of times between Bob Gibson and eternity.

The consistency is something to marvel at, too. Here’s deGrom’s season ERA after the first start of every month:

March - 1.59
April - 1.54
May - 1.87
June - 1.49
July - 1.79
August - 1.85
September - 1.68

Other than a two-start stretch in early May that included his only four-run outing and a 45-pitch, one-inning start that came after his return from the DL, deGrom was consistently limiting teams to a run or two over six, seven, or eight innings. Three runs if they were freakishly lucky.

A simpler way to put it: More than any other pitcher in baseball in 2018, deGrom was better at his stated task of getting hitters out. Eight-hundred-and-thirty-five batters came to the plate against him this year, and most of them were dispatched with a historic effectiveness. There have been 19 pitchers to throw more than 200 innings and allow fewer than 50 earned runs since the Cy Young Award was created: Most of them won the Cy Young. This is because preventing base runners and, by extension, runs is the most important thing that a pitcher can do.

And that’s the story of Jacob deGrom’s Cy Young.

There are to be no other stories than this, which is a detailed recounting of his utter dominance and disregard for the hitters who faced him in a one-on-one confrontation, over and over again.

There really isn’t anything else to point out.

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FINE, fine, I made it 550 words before getting to the part where the NY Mets baseball squadron was complicit in extreme nincompoopery behind deGrom. They wasted a pitcher having an all-time dominant season like few teams have ever wasted a player before. The Mets were 14-18 in his starts. The Royals were 13-17 in Jakob Junis’ starts. The Reds were 13-12 when Sal Romano started. Those bad teams fared just as well, if not better, when they deployed a pitcher with an ERA in the high 4.00s than the Mets did when they started a pitcher having one of the greatest modern pitching seasons.

This had nothing to do with how deGrom pitched. If you’re a mustachioed Hall of Famer grumbling about how deGrom didn’t know how to win, here’s a pat on the head and a biscuit. Keeping doing you. The rest of us are completely in agreement that there is only so much that a pitcher can do in his job, which is to disappoint the hopeful men waving a cylindrical stick who have been arrayed against him. Nobody did that job better than deGrom in 2018.

That doesn’t mean it’s not remarkable and/or funny to revisit exactly how deGrom’s season was frittered away. His first bad beat came against the Nationals, when the Mets were in the middle of a ludicrously hot start to their season, and it should have been a sign. deGrom was pulled with a 6-1 lead after allowing two ground-ball singles, and that’s when the Mets bullpen started licking the bathroom floor.

Three walks, a hit-by-pitch, and more than a half-hour later, deGrom was bumped from a win to a no-decision. I’m partial to the broken-bat hit that tied it:

Almost got it, Wilmer! Strong effort and dive, Asdrubal! It’s at this point that Keith Hernandez made a noise that sounded like, “Mmrnnoooo” and presumably ate his pen. deGrom struck out 12 and allowed just one run on his own, leaving with a five-run lead and a 99-percent win expectancy. Then there were broken-bat hits, walks, and moments of fall-down defense.

That was just one game. It might have been the most ominous, but the rest were just as painful.

The Mets reliever who followed deGrom in his next start, A.J. Ramos, took over with a 3-0 lead and immediately walked the first batter he faced. He limited the damage to just two runs, but Jeurys Familia came into protect a one-run lead in the ninth and immediately walked the first batter he faced. The Mets eventually lost on a walk-off bunt.

After that two-start weirdness in May, deGrom lost a 7 IP, 0 R, 8 K start after Familia couldn’t save a 1-0 lead in the ninth. In the next brilliant deGrom start, the Braves comeback started when the first batter to face anyone other than deGrom got a little home-field advantage on a bunt:

It wasn’t a great bunt, but the turf gave out just enough to make Seth Lugo throw wide. Everything would fall apart shortly after.

Then there was the time the Padres took a lead because of an outfield error in the fifth and then extended the lead on a shortstop error in the sixth, or the time when the Mets couldn’t hit Mike Montgomery or Cory Mazzoni, or the time when Anthony Swarzak took over for deGrom in the eighth with a one-run lead and gave up a homer to professional pseudonym JT Riddle six pitches later, or ... look, they all go like this. It wasn’t pretty.

There have been just five pitchers in baseball history to win 10 games or fewer with an ERA under 2.00 and 200 innings pitched. The most recent one was in 1908, with the rest coming in the 1800s. The sheer effort it took to lose this many games with deGrom pitching is tremendous to behold, and it should almost be celebrated.

Almost.

But that’s the ugly stuff, and it had to be included because it makes for breathtaking content. The important stuff is in the first half of the article, which details just how silly deGrom made hitters look. He was better at his job than almost any starting pitcher in the 150 seasons before him, and we’re blessed to live in a time where that’s not overlooked just because the Mets were Metsier than almost any other team in history.

deGrom might not have won this Cy Young in 2000. Mostly because he was 12, but also because there was a stigma against voting pitchers who could manage only a 10-9 record, regardless of how brilliantly they pitched. That’s over, and baseball is better for it. This will be one of the only times a pitcher will win the Cy Young and have people say, “Better luck next year” in response.

What a beautiful, silly season. There aren’t a lot of seasons that you can simultaneously love and laugh at. Let’s make sure we appreciate them properly when they come around.