New York Mets: Imagining Jacob deGrom … with an offense
By Bill Felber
How might New York Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom have done with a world championship offense behind him? Re-imagining his remarkable 2018 season
By now, baseball fans are comfortable with the idea that Jacob deGrom’s 10-9 regular season record said a lot more about the languid condition of the New York Mets offense than it did about deGrom’s pitching.
For the record, the National League Cy Young Award winner led the majors with a 1.70 ERA in 32 starts, allowing more than two runs in only seven of them and allowing more than three runs only once. In 11 of his starts, he pitched seven innings or more while allowing two or fewer runs yet failed to win.
And that raises a provocative if whimsical question: What kind of record would deGrom have had if he had pitched for a team with a more productive offense?
(Actually, it may not be all that whimsical a question at all in a year or two. DeGrom won’t be a free agent until the end of the 2020 season. But he and his agent are already demanding the working out of a long-term extension before the regular season begins. That, however, is another topic.)
DeGrom’s Mets averaged only 4.2 runs per game in 2018, ranking in a tie for 22nd in baseball in that category. With deGrom on the mound, they were worse than that, averaging just 3.5 runs per game during his starts.
The Boston Red Sox were baseball’s top team in run production in 2018, at 5.4 runs per game. What record might deGrom have compiled if he had pitched for the Red Sox instead of the Mets?
Obviously, on a strictly factual basis, the question is unanswerable for a host of reasons, not least of which is that DeGrom would have been facing different opponents in different settings. Still it’s intriguing to ponder since it might put deGrom’s 2018 season into a new perspective.
Exploring the question requires a few stipulations. Here they are. We’ll stipulate that deGrom started on the same days for the Red Sox as he actually did for the Mets, that Boston ‘s offense was as productive or unproductive on those days as it actually was, and that the Red Sox pen performed as it actually did once deGrom left the game.
If deGrom pitched on a day when the Red Sox did not have a game, those performances will be skipped for purposes of this exercise. That happened three times, so it reduces deGrom’s comparable starts from 32 to 29.
Would a Red Sox deGrom have won 20 games? How about 25? Would he have lost any? Let’s find out. Each of the panels below contains a table showing the dates deGrom pitched, Boston’s opponent on that date, the number of innings deGrom pitched, the projected game score at the point he would have left, the actual performance of Boston’s staff from that point until game’s end, the projected final score and deGrom’s projected record.