How Jacob deGrom’s elbow surgery deprives us of one of MLB’s best —
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With his first pitch in a Texas Rangers uniform, Jacob deGrom threw a 99.6 mph fastball. His next five fastballs, in his Opening Day start this March, clocked in at 99.4, 99.5, 99.7, 100.1 and 101.0. He lasted just 73 pitches in that outing, his first with the Rangers after signing a five-year, $185 million contract as a free agent, but deGrom would throw 16 of them at 99 mph or faster, plus another dozen at 98 mph.
It seemed like a bright omen of things to come. Instead, his final pitch of 2023 came just 29 days later, on April 28. He went on the IL a day later, and it was announced Tuesday that deGrom will undergo surgery to repair his ulnar collateral ligament. He will miss the rest of the season and likely much of 2024, meaning that for Texas in 2023 — and possibly next year too — he threw 451 pitches. The most bittersweet stat of all: 189 of them were at least 98 mph — nearly 42%.
With the news, my first thought was of my colleague Jeff Passan’s book, “The Arm,” in which he captures the importance and the fragility of the arm, at a time when Major League Baseball was seeing unprecedented numbers of Tommy John surgeries. A basic synopsis might be that the human arm, with more than 20 muscles in the upper arm and forearm, simply isn’t constructed to repeatedly throw a small leather sphere overhand at 100 miles per hour — no matter how much fun we have watching it do so. “One thing I now know,” Jeff writes, “is that for all its travails, all the heartache it can cause, all the frustrations left in its wake, the arm is capable of wondrous things.”
That has certainly been the case with deGrom.
Few pitchers in the sport’s history have matched his peak level of excellence. He led the league in ERA in 2018, when he won the first of his back-to-back Cy Young Awards, and he made at least 30 starts…
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