All hail the free market! All hail labor empowerment! All hail the ability of the Texas Rangers to commit as many dollars and years as they choose to Jacob deGrom [1], and all hail Jacob deGrom’s ability to choose to take the dollars (185 million of them) and years (five, carrying him past his 39th birthday). Enabled by the miracle of the collective bargaining process, we get to see the American way in action.
Isn’t that just swell?
The Rangers figure they’ll benefit from deGrom’s right arm doing its wondrous thing for as long as it can. DeGrom will benefit from being paid at a level commensurate with his level of achievement stretching back the past five years. And Rangers fans will have a closeup view of a pitcher described regularly and with minimal hyperbole by the acronym for Greatest Of All Time.
The only people who might lose out in this scenario are us, the jilted Mets fans who will not see Jacob deGrom continue his essentially incomparable career as a Met. Nine years and out for Jacob, whom I’m no longer in the mood to refer to as “Jake” or deGOAT, for that matter. Jacob exercised his negotiated right to opt out of his contract. Leave a door open on a goat pen and bet on whether the goat will wander away (the commissioner of baseball will gladly process your gamble).
And now it is done [2]. Jacob deGrom is a former Met. I imagine at some point the franchise pitcher on whom we hung our hat and pride since 2014, especially since 2018, will issue a statement thanking the Mets and Mets fans for their support to date. He’ll probably say something out loud when he tries on his new jersey and cap in Arlington or over Zoom from DeLand. I think he’s enough of a mensch to stand and deliver that much. Maybe it will be supplemented by a social media gesture, the contemporary version of departing free agents taking out full-page newspaper ads. We used to rely on daily newspapers. We used to rely on Jacob deGrom.
[3]Month’s off to a heckuva start.
Those were the days, my friend. Even allowing for cynicism, I kinda thought they’d never end. Why should have they? At every turn, Jacob deGrom exulted [4] in the exultation we as Mets fans devoted in his direction. We shrouded him in our affection, we waited with longing and loving for his return from various trips to the injured list, we stood and swooned over his Lynyrd Skynyrd-scored simplicity [5]. Sure, he’d opted out of his very nice if not absolutely nicest possible contract, but that contract was signed when the signatory on the other side of the pact was a Wilpon. You knew Steve Cohen could take care of business as needed.
Except in Texas, bidness is bidness, if you will indulge the stereotypical oil baron dialect, and their version of Cohen decided it would be great for bidness to take care of bidness to the extreme, offering Jacob deGrom those five years, which math will tell you is two more than the three the Mets apparently put out there. The average annual value for deGrom in New York was reportedly [6] a little more: $40 million per annum versus $37 million. The total was a lot more from Texas: $185 million over five years versus $120 million over three. DeGrom doesn’t have to do math like he does pitching to do the relevant math.
The relevant emotion to a certain strain of Mets fan, perhaps best classified as the unsentimental kind, is how few innings Jacob deGrom threw between July 7, 2021, and August 2, 2022: 0. Intermittently during his Met run, particularly in the most recent years, Jacob became one of those sitcom tropes. Vera from Cheers. Maris from Frasier. Captain Tuttle from M*A*S*H.
“Anybody seen Jake?”
“Ah, ya just missed him.”
“What, again?”
“Don’t sweat it. He’ll be back soon.”
The relevant emotion to a certain strain of Mets fan, perhaps best classified as the sentimental kind, is how few innings Jacob deGrom threw from his debut of May 15, 2014, forward for any team that wasn’t the New York Mets: 0. That data point paired with the hope that Jake (had he stayed here, that’s what I’d call him) would become that rarest of birds, the elite Met starter who was nurtured in the nest and never flew the coop. We know it’s never happened before [7]. We have learned it is not likely to ever happen again.
[8]Once you let deGOAT opt out of his pen, there’s no telling where he’ll seek greener pastures.
The “elite” nature of deGrom was never in question, save for a little collar-tugging and throat-clearing at the sight of Jake maybe running out of petrol in sixth innings as his late-starting 2022 wore on. I chose to believe he was still getting up to speed after not pitching in the major leagues for thirteen months. I chose to believe his excursions to the IL were the exception, not the rule. I chose to believe a lot in Jacob deGrom. I believed he wouldn’t leave us. You can’t always get what you believe.
You can get a replacement. You have to. Emotionally, I’d be OK with inscribing No. 48 on the Citi Field mound and everybody going home the first time what would have been his turn comes up, but business doesn’t work that way, and what would have been his turn will come up approximately 32 times in 2023. The Mets will sign some very fortunate free agent pitcher, whoever it will be. That pitcher’s negotiation position just rose substantially. We don’t have deGrom, but we do have Cohen. This takes the sting out of the news in a way unavailable to us when the Mets were under previous ownership.
It’s all still wrong, mind you. Jacob deGrom slipping into the uniform of the Texas Rangers is wrong. Somewhere in this great country, somebody thought Max Scherzer slipping into the uniform of the New York Mets was wrong, but we cheered it. His wardrobe change gave us the pair of Aces to die for. It gave us a helluva rotation in theory last offseason and in reality for a couple of months. It didn’t yield a division title or a playoff series win. That loading up of Aces worked to its fullest extent only once for Atlanta when they had Maddux, Gl@v!ne and Smoltz, and it never completely panned out for Oakland when they had Hudson, Zito and Mulder. You never know with September and October. But you liked heading into the end of a season and the beginning of a postseason with the likes of deGrom and Scherzer.
Now we’ll go into the beginning of the season with Scherzer and whoever. We’ll look back on nine years of deGrom less and less while he’s doing whatever he does as an American League Westerner. Every time I want to do one of my historical dives about Met starting pitching, there will be an implied ruefulness and an explicit wistfulness to bringing Jacob deGrom into the conversation. One year, it’s all “we” and “our” for a player you understood could take a hike but didn’t really think would. The next year, he’s “former” and “erstwhile,” and we’ve moved on because we have to. Someday down the road, far down the road if the former and erstwhile Met is lucky, he will have a reason to come back in a ceremonial, celebratory capacity. We have Old Timers Days again. At the one we had this year, we warmly greeted Jose Reyes who left to be a Marlin and Daniel Murphy who left to be a National. That, we should all live so long, comes later.
For now, it’s just business.