deGrom is healthy again and dominating on the mound for the Texas Rangers.
ARLINGTON, Texas — The Rangers‘ offense is on the mend, but far from healed. Marcus Semien is slumping through a terrible stretch, and Corey Seager can’t shake a lingering hamstring injury. Sure, the Texas bats came to life in Detroit last weekend, and then beat up on the historically bad Rockies, but the Rangers’ run total still sits near the bottom of Major League Baseball.
Thursday night showed why, sometimes, none of that matters – and how a club that was buried in offensive ineptitude can string together a six-game win streak and climb to 24-21, just a half-game out of first place.
It starts and ends with the pitching.
Jacob deGrom tossed eight scoreless innings against the Astros, striking out seven batters, walking just one and keeping Houston at bay long enough for Jake Burger to give the Rangers a 1-0 lead on a solo homer.
Shawn Armstrong earned the save in the ninth, and Texas took its first matchup of the season against their American League West rivals.
It was what Rangers’ fans might begrudgingly have to accept about the 2025 version of this team: The bats won’t always be there – even though they’re improving – but the pitching appears it will be.
After deGrom’s sparkling performance Thursday, the Rangers’ starting pitching ERA was lowered to 2.90 ERA, the best in the American League and the second-lowest in all of baseball behind the New York Mets (2.74).
Texas can probably expect some regression to the mean with the bullpen and the back-end starters, and high-leverage relivers Chis Martin and Luke Jackson getting hurt this week won’t help matters. But no team in baseball boasts the Rangers’ level of frontline starting pitching, at least at the moment, with the Dodgers battling injuries.
And no team has deGrom, who’s steadily rediscovering his form as the best starting pitcher on the planet.
He’s not there yet, and no one – not even a healthy deGrom – is likely to duplicate his run with the Mets from 2014-2020, when he won two Cy Youngs and carried a 2.61 ERA across 1,100 innings.
But deGrom, on stuff alone, can get close, and he’s showing that with each passing start. The Astros peppered seven batted balls over 100 mph on Thursday night, but they also whiffed 15 times and only one of their five hits went for extra bases.
deGrom’s velocity is ticking up – he’s routinely touching 99 with his four-seam fastball – and his slider, his go-to pitch that confounded hitters at his peak with the Mets, is seemingly getting nastier. deGrom induced 10 swings and misses with the slider Thursday night.
The most notable change in deGrom’s numbers, so far, has been a lower strikeout rate. He’s getting about one per inning (9.4 per nine innings, to be exact), which is a tick below his career average of 10.9 per nine innings, and far from his peak in 2020, when he struck out 13.8 batters per nine. But there’s an upside to that, too. deGrom has worked efficiently, already throwing 51 innings and average more than six innings per start.
deGrom is pitching more to contact, which, conversely, could be viewed as hitters taking a more proactive approach against a pitcher with putaway stuff. On Thursday night, plenty of that contact was hard. But a few solid plays by the defense, including Adolis Garcia’s stellar glove in right field, kept the Astros from mounting any rally, and deGrom three times had a strikeout to end an inning with a runner on base.
All of which is to say what most people in baseball will acknowledge: Even if deGrom isn’t at his career peak, he can still be better than almost any pitcher in the game. His injury-plagued seasons since 2021 made that easy to forget, even if the numbers don’t.
Of all deGrom’s other-worldly stats, perhaps the most impressive – if not a bit in the weeds – is his standing as the career leader among active pitchers in WHIP, walks plus hits over innings pitched. Essentially a measure over how many baserunners a pitcher allows per innings, deGrom has maintained a career WHIP of 0.993. Clayton Kershaw isn’t far behind, at 1.009. But what’s remarkable about deGrom is his average isn’t just the best among active pitchers – it’s second all-time. And when you look at the Baseball Reference WHIP leaderboard, deGrom sits between two guys who were born in the 1880s.
He’s that good. Historically good.
In 2025, he’s simply issuing a reminder.