Jacob deGrom
"Jacob deGrom spent his college years as a shortstop, then became one of the most dominant, and most fragile, arms of his generation."
DeGrom didn't pitch regularly until college — he was recruited to Stetson University as a shortstop, and only moved to the mound when the team needed arms.
At an age when most power pitchers have already declined, deGrom is trying to prove that his 2018-2019 peak — two of the most statistically dominant Cy Young seasons in modern history — can survive a body that has now required multiple major arm surgeries.
The Cy Young trophies tend to flatten his story into 'generational talent.' What gets lost is that he wasn't a can't-miss pitching prospect at all — he was a middle infielder who nearly didn't become a pitcher, and his entire career has been a race against a body that never quite adjusted to the workload.
アメリカの大学野球では、投手が足りなくなったチームが内野手を急遽マウンドに立たせることが珍しくない。デグロムはまさにその一人で、遊撃手としてStetson大学に入学し、後に投手に転向した。日本の育成システムでは早期に投手専任となることが多いため、この経歴は対照的である。
Fans watching deGrom's cautious pitch counts and shortened outings in Texas are seeing the direct legacy of America's ongoing 'Tommy John epidemic' — a decades-long, still-unresolved crisis in which elite velocity is increasingly tied to elbow ligament failure, reshaping how teams manage even their best arms.
Jacob deGrom, born June 19, 1988, in DeLand, Florida, debuted with the Mets on May 15, 2014, and within five years had won back-to-back National League Cy Young Awards. His career has been defined by two contradictory forces: rare, almost surgical command of a mid-to-upper-90s fastball, and a body that has repeatedly broken down under the strain of throwing it. He now pitches for the Texas Rangers.
| Year | Team | G | W–L | ERA | IP | SO | WHIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | TEX | 18 | 7–5 | 3.49 | 100.2 | 122 | 1.01 |
| 2025 | TEX | 30 | 12–8 | 2.97 | 172.2 | 185 | 0.92 |
| 2024 | TEX | 3 | 0–0 | 1.69 | 10.2 | 14 | 1.13 |
| Career | — | 266 | 103–70 | 2.63 | 1640.1 | 1973 | 0.99 |
Source: MLB Stats API · regular season
From Shortstop to Ace
Long before he was striking out a generation of National League hitters, deGrom was a shortstop. He arrived at Stetson University, a mid-major program in his home state of Florida, as a position player, and only transitioned to pitching once the team's rotation thinned out. It is one of the more widely told origin stories in modern baseball — a player who wasn't groomed from adolescence to be a frontline starter, but who essentially backed into the role, and then outgrew everyone who had been pitching longer than he had. The Mets drafted him in the ninth round of the 2010 draft, a slot that produces far more organizational depth than it does Cy Young winners.
The Peak
DeGrom's May 15, 2014 debut opened a decade in which he became, by ERA and strikeout rate, one of the most efficient starting pitchers of his era. His back-to-back NL Cy Young Awards in 2018 and 2019 came during a stretch when the Mets, as a franchise, were rarely competitive — meaning deGrom's dominance was often disconnected from win totals, a quirk that forced voters and analysts to lean more heavily on advanced metrics than on the traditional win column to make sense of what he was doing.
A Body Under Contract
The defining tension of deGrom's career has been physical. At 6-foot-4 and listed at 180 pounds, he has never had the classic power-pitcher's frame, and the elbow and forearm injuries that have interrupted his late twenties and thirties — including procedures that sidelined him for extended stretches — have made him as much a case study in pitching mechanics and workload as in raw talent. His move to the Texas Rangers as a free agent brought him to a franchise banking on the idea that, healthy, he remains capable of pitching at his old level, even in smaller doses.
What Comes Next
DeGrom's later career is now less about accumulating innings than about proving that a diminished workload can still produce elite results in the outings he does make. Whether that experiment succeeds may say as much about the sport's evolving relationship with pitcher health as it does about deGrom himself.
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Jacob deGrom gear at the official MLB ShopThis profile was written by AI (Claude Sonnet) using publicly available sources. Interpretations and cultural notes are AI-generated and may not reflect the views of the player, their team, or MLB. This page contains affiliate links.