The promise of Jacob deGrom and the Mets

Early in September, I wrote a preview article for the National League awards, including the Rookie of the Year. In that article, Jacob deGrom’s name did not appear once. This is because I am bad at my job. I’m not sure if I didn’t toggle the right field in my search, if I didn’t look through the pitchers at all, or if I didn’t remember to add the innings he was going to pitch in September to what he had already accrued. Whatever the reason, it was sloppy. He was a contender, if not the favorite, back then, and now he’s likely to be the first Rookie of the Year for the Mets since Dwight Gooden in 1985.

The contrast between deGrom and Gooden is obvious in a few ways. deGrom isn’t a teenaged legend with an arm made out of melted gods, for one. That works out better for deGrom on the other end, though: By the time Gooden was deGrom’s age (26), he was already on the other side of his career arc. He would never pick up another Cy Young vote or make another All-Star team after his 25th year, yet deGrom’s career is just starting.

The biggest difference between the last two Rookies of the Year for the Mets, though, has to do with the Mets themselves. Gooden was the heartbeat of baseball for a while, the reason a dedicated football fan would watch an All-Star Game for the first time. If Gooden were on the Expos, it would have been a similar scenario -- the arm was that radioactive -- but there was a big-city sheen to the whole affair that put it over the top. Paul Simon is a rock star when he plays a bar in Duluth, but there’s something about him playing in front of 100,000 people in Central Park to drive the point home.

Gooden appeared near the start of the Mets’ run, the youth-driven mess of baseball brilliance that made the Mets one of the most recognizable and remembered teams of the ‘80s, if not the last 50 years. There wasn’t a way to miss a Rookie of the Year on that team, and if deGrom had shown up in 1987, a wild blur of hair and fastball, he would have been an instant rock star. He would have dominated every How ‘Bout That? segment of This Week In Baseball for a year, if not been the subject of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

Instead, deGrom is the kind of guy forgotten by bad baseball writers because he plays on a forgettable team. These Mets aren’t those Mets. In fact, they’ve spent the last few years actively trying to make you forget those Mets existed. The Mets are the Twins are the Padres are the White Sox are the Mets. There’s no cachet with the Mets.

For now.

A team in New York is a dormant volcano. A team with the rich history of the Mets, in New York, will always have a shot to be the center of the baseball world for a season or five. If they’re going to do that, though, they’ll need a lot of help. They’ll need super prospects to develop into All-Stars, and it’s been a long time since David Wright and Jose Reyes were the seeming heralds of a new gilded age. More than the obvious prospects-into-stars progression, though, they’ll need surprises. They’ll need to leave a pile of straw on the counter and wake up to a pile of gold.

That’s what makes deGrom so necessary for the Mets if they’re going to be relevant soon. They need a 26-year-old to show up and throw 97 mph with a darting slider, as if he were saddled with restrictor plates throughout most of his minor league career. Look at this guy:

That pitcher struck out about seven batters for every nine innings he pitched in the minors, right around the league average at every stop. He was a ninth-rounder who was hit hard by teenagers in Rookie League for five starts before he underwent Tommy John surgery, and he started the year in the minors because the Mets figured they had five better starting pitchers. Look at the video again. Back to the first two sentences of this paragraph. Back to the video. Back to -- how did an arm that good produce such underwhelming numbers in the minors? How did an arm that good not break camp with a Mets team having open auditions for fifth starter?

It doesn’t matter. The straw is gold now. It wasn’t the most obvious path for a possible Rookie of the Year to take, but it was still a brilliant one. While the Mets were waiting for Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler to be stars, deGrom snuck up on everyone. Now the Mets can still wait for Syndergaard and Wheeler while enjoying deGrom, and the path for these Mets to become those Mets becomes so stinking clear: The pitching will lead them to strange, old heights. deGrom will start the surge, and Wheeler will be close behind. Then Syndergaard will show up and be the best arm of...

Easy. Eaaaaaasy. But you can see how it would/could/should happen. Relying on a pair of prospects is fun and dangerous, but now the Mets have a prospect, an exciting arm with major league experience, and an even more exciting arm with a trophy to polish. They should also get super-ace Matt Harvey back, more or less how they found him. That’s less daunting. They need just about one of everything in the lineup, but the pitching is at a point where it’s worth imagining how that gets fixed. If David Wright bounces back and stays healthy, if Wilmer Flores develops, if ownership sees the potential and makes a play for -- well, something, a middle-of-the-order bat that actually costs more than a bag of Funyuns.

When that all happens deGrom will be the rock star he would have been on the mid-‘80s Mets, a pitcher bad baseball writers won’t forget when they’re busy being bad. If the Mets return to their rightful place at the top of Big-Market Team That Annoys the Rest of the World Mountain, where they should probably live every season, it’s probably because deGrom is doing good things. In that respect, he’s every bit as electric and exciting to Mets fans as their last Rookie of the Year. From afterthought to cornerstone in 22 starts, Jacob deGrom was exactly what the Mets needed. He should continue to be exactly what they need -- as long as the Mets keep adding more like him.