With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of the offseason, taking a look at every player who appeared in a major league game for the Texas Rangers in 2025.<\/p>\n
Today we are looking at pitcher Jacob deGrom.<\/p>\n
Jacob deGrom made 30 starts for the Texas Rangers in 2025.<\/p>\n
That, in and of itself, is a success of sorts. When the Texas Rangers signed Jacob deGrom after the 2022 season, there were many dire predictions that the Rangers wouldn\u2019t get a full season from him, that he might not make 30 starts in the entirety of his Ranger career, much less in a single season.<\/p>\n
The thing about the \u201cdeGrom isn\u2019t durable\u201d narrative is that went from non-existent to conventional wisdom in roughly 18 months. From 2017 through 2020, deGrom made 107 starts, tied with Jon Lester for the 6th most in MLB in that span. Gerrit Cole, Zack Greinke and Rick Porcello each had 110 starts, Patrick Corbin had 109 starts, and Lance Lynn had 108 starts. He was first in innings pitched in that span, with 690.1.<\/p>\n
Then in 2021 he had one of the weirdest great seasons ever, putting up a 1.08 ERA in 15 starts. He followed that up with 11 starts in 2022. The missed time over those two campaigns resulted in deGrom going from a workhorse to unreliable in the public\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n
Then 2023 and 2024 and deGrom made just 9 starts for the Rangers due to undergoing his second Tommy John surgery. The haters said deGrom couldn\u2019t stay healthy. And they were correct. Honestly great call from the haters.<\/p>\n
Until this past year, when deGrom made his 30 starts and threw 172 innings and put concerns \u2014 immediate concerns, anyway \u2014 about his ability to stay healthy to rest.<\/p>\n
And that was the important thing, because if Jacob deGrom is healthy, he\u2019s going to be really good. There was not really any question about that. Which is kind of funny, given his background as a ninth round pick out of Stetson who didn\u2019t pitch until his junior year, someone who had his first Tommy John surgery soon after being drafted, someone who never was hyped coming up, who topped out at #10 on the BA Mets prospect lists.<\/p>\n
A couple of digressions real quick\u2026<\/p>\n
First of all, something I\u2019ve theorized before is that guys who transition from being a position player to pitching have a higher than usual risk of UCL damage right after making the switch. I haven\u2019t studied this, its just anecdotal in nature, but it seems like we see a lot of instances of players converting to pitching, showing promise, and then having to go under the knife for Tommy John surgery. I would guess that the change in stress on the elbow for someone in their 20s makes them more likely to tear the UCL. That said, as I mentioned in the Sam Haggerty writeup yesterday, I\u2019m not a doctor, and I don\u2019t even play one on TV.<\/p>\n
Secondly, Jacob deGrom made his major league debut one month before his 26th birthday. That\u2019s incredibly late for a player who is legitimately great. Whenever deGrom retires, he\u2019s going to have a fascinating Hall of Fame case. He\u2019s not going to have big compiler numbers \u2014 hell, he doesn\u2019t even have 100 career wins yet \u2014 but he still has the aura of a Hall of Famer, with a stretch of being historically dominant. His JAWS score, right now, is almost identical to Felix Hernandez, who looks like he\u2019s going to get voted into the Hall in the next few years. (Though he does trail Johan Santana, and I\u2019m still angry about him being one-and-done.)<\/p>\n
Getting back on point\u2026I think it is fair to ask, how good was Jacob deGrom, really, in 2025? Ace good, or solid mid-rotation starter good?<\/p>\n
deGrom\u2019s 2.97 ERA is impressive, the 13th best among the 70 major league pitchers with at least 150 innings pitched in 2025. His ERA+ of 123, however, ranked him 21st \u2014 a byproduct of B-R\u2019s park factors treating the Shed as extremely pitcher-friendly. And his 2.9 bWAR had him tied for 27th in the majors, tied with Quinn Priester and, ironically, Merrill Kelly, and one slot behind his new teammate MacKenzie Gore, due to the credit that the Rangers defense (which B-R\u2019s numbers have as easily the best in the majors in 2025) gets towards his run prevention.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, deGrom didn\u2019t allow an unearned run all season. Well, maybe that\u2019s not interesting to you, but it is to me.<\/p>\n
If you prefer fWAR, deGrom does better there, with his 3.4 fWAR being 21st in the majors among the 70 pitchers with at least 150 innings in 2025. And his xERA (3.36) ordinal ranking was even better, as he slotted in at 11th overall.<\/p>\n
So its kind of complicated.<\/p>\n
deGrom isn\u2019t the same pitcher he was when he was with the Mets. His K rate \u2014 27.7% in 2025 \u2014 is just great, not otherworldly (in that ridiculous 2021 season, he struck out 45% of the batters he faced). His walk rate is also great, not unworldly, though the combination of great K rate and great walk rate is still pretty special. His velocity is down a tad from his final years with the Mets (though higher, interestingly, than it was in his earlier years in New York), though with a fastball that average 97.5 mph in 2025 he\u2019s still one of the hardest throwing starting pitchers in the game.<\/p>\n
deGrom in 2025, though, did have issues with allowing loud contact. And, of course, he had issues with the long ball in 2025, allowing the highest HR\/9 rate of his career, and the 16th highest of our 70 pitchers with at least 150 innings.<\/p>\n
One of the interesting evolutions deGrom has undergone since joining the Rangers is that he has become a fly ball pitcher. That evolution has actually been in progress for a while \u2014 his first four seasons with the Mets, he had a ground ball rate of 47.4% to 48.0%. From 2019 to 2022 it dropped from 45.2% to 40.3%, and has been below 40% all three seasons with the Rangers, including 38.1% in 2025, per Statcast. As a point of reference, Statcast has the MLB average during deGrom\u2019s career at 44.2%.<\/p>\n
Really, deGrom\u2019s homer issues didn\u2019t become an issue until the back end of the 2025 season. Through the end of June, deGrom was sporting a 2.08 ERA and 3.08 FIP in 16 games, with just 9 homers allowed. For July through September, deGrom allowed 17 homers in 10 starts, resulting in a 4.07 ERA and a 4.34 FIP.<\/p>\n
Weirdly, deGrom\u2019s K rate actually improve somewhat in the final three months, while his walk rate stayed the same. His BABIP, which was miniscule all year \u2014 .230, 2nd best in our 70 pitcher sample \u2014 dipped slightly. He just went from giving up fewer than 1 home run per 9 innings in the first three months of the season to almost 2 bombs per 9 innings in the final three months.<\/p>\n
Is it a cause for concern? Is this a trend, where we are going to be seeing deGrom feeding his gopher more and more often in 2026? Is it a matter of him just wearing down in his first season back after Tommy John surgery?<\/p>\n
I do think its not unreasonable to think that the workload caught up to deGrom over the course of the 2025 season. The 172 innings he threw were more than he had thrown in the previous three seasons, majors and minors, combined. It was almost twice as many innings as he\u2019d thrown in any single season, majors and minors combined, since 2019. And of course, he\u2019s 37.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure what to expect from deGrom in 2026. I expect he will be good. If he\u2019s as good as he was in the first half of 2025, the Rangers will have one of the best pitchers in baseball.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d really like for that to be the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2393],"tags":[52311,5,4,149,1567,69,3240],"class_list":{"0":"post-583183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas-rangers","8":"tag-2025-season-in-review","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-rangers","12":"tag-texas","13":"tag-texas-rangers","14":"tag-texasrangers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116104032136996150","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}