NEW YORK — The Texas Rangers visited Citi Field two years ago in late summer. They were on their way to a World Series title and left Jacob deGrom behind. He had recently undergone Tommy John surgery, and he’s unsure if his elbow was still in a brace. Either way, it was safer to avoid rowdy dugouts.
“It’s kind of ‘Stay out of the way so you don’t get a random high five,’” deGrom said on Friday night, with a smile. “It’s probably not good.”
This time, there were high fives and hugs and a video tribute to the greatest Mets pitcher of the past three decades. DeGrom earned all of it with seven tidy innings in an 8-3 victory that showed why the Rangers have mounted an unlikely playoff push while the Mets might be blowing their chance.
The Mets have lost seven games in a row and 10 of their past 13, barely hanging onto a postseason spot in the National League. The Rangers have won 17 of their past 24, a feisty bunch of Little Rascals piled on each other’s shoulders, stretching to reach the American League playoffs.
“There’s just a lot of fight,” said starter Merrill Kelly, who was acquired in a deadline deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks. “With what went on when I first got here, I think that we could have easily said, ‘All right, it was a good try,’ and just taken the rest of the season for what it was. But we obviously didn’t do that.”
The Rangers didn’t seem to need another starter in July, when deGrom was an All-Star and Nathan Eovaldi, the Rangers’ Game 1 starter in the World Series run, was the AL pitcher of the month. President of baseball operations Chris Young got Kelly anyway, a move that looked prescient when a rotator cuff injury ended Eovaldi’s season.
Texas turned to a youth brigade to cover for its injured position players — Marcus Semien and Evan Carter, who won’t come back, and Adolis García and Corey Seager, who probably will. Kelly has been a co-ace with deGrom, going 3-1 with a 3.19 ERA in eight starts for Texas.
“Huge, huge,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said. “Great job by (Chris Young) acquiring Merrill to help us out there. Starting pitching, they set the tone. So anytime you lose somebody like Nate, it’s hard to recover from that. With Merrill being in the rotation, it helps soften the blow.”
The Mets, under David Stearns, went big on bullpen help and counted on their farm system to plug a fragile rotation. The decision has backfired: Gregory Soto and Ryan Helsley, who mopped up on Friday, have combined for a 7.03 ERA. Tyler Rogers has been effective since his acquisition from San Francisco, but he came at the cost of reliever José Buttó — who has also pitched well — and outfield prospect Drew Gilbert, now the Giants’ everyday right fielder as they chase the Mets.
Everything is sputtering now for the Mets, who haven’t drawn a walk since Wednesday. Their last 25 batters went down in order on Thursday in Philadelphia, and deGrom retired his final 15 hitters on Friday. The Mets looked sloppy in the field against Texas, filling the box score with all the wrong stuff: two errors, a wild pitch, a hit batter, an ejection (Jeff McNeil).
But the rotation is the real culprit of the Mets’ slide. At their high point of the season — 21 games over .500 on June 12 — the Mets had the lowest starters’ ERA in the majors, 2.79, while averaging 5 1/3 innings per start. Since then, Mets starters have a 5.26 ERA while averaging 4 2/3 innings.
“The name of the game is pitching, right, and you’re going to need starters,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “It’s hard to sustain and keep (relievers) healthy when you have to keep using them. … When starters go down and don’t go deep in games, I don’t think that’s ideal.”
Mendoza said that before the game, and the problem soon grew substantially worse. Before deGrom even threw a pitch, Mendoza had already trudged to the mound, down 6-0, to remove rookie starter Jonah Tong.
The Mets had gone precisely 1,000 games without a performance like this. No Mets starter had allowed six earned runs without surviving the first inning since Steven Matz on April 16, 2019. Fred Wilpon owned the team, Mickey Callaway managed it, and Brodie Van Wagenen ran the front office. It’s been a while.
DeGrom was the Mets’ best player that season, as he usually was for most of his nine years in Queens. The start of Friday’s game seemed to make a mockery of how badly the Mets wasted his best years: Sure, now he gets some run support at Citi Field.
The Mets were allergic to offense in deGrom’s prime, inexplicably going 14-18 when he started in 2018, his first Cy Young season — and then doing it again the next year, when he repeated the feat. On Friday, deGrom earned his 12th victory of the season, a modest total he hadn’t achieved in eight years.
Through 28 starts and 162 2/3 innings pitched this season, Jacob deGrom has a 2.82 ERA with 171 strikeouts. (Brad Penner / Imagn Images)
That was before the Cy Young Awards, before the $185 million contract with Texas, before the second Tommy John surgery, before the comeback that has inspired his teammates.
“There’s a lot of courage, there’s a lot of grit, a lot of determination,” Rangers third baseman Josh Jung said. “He’s never wavered, which is the cool thing. Especially when he was with us in ’23, and even through last year, he just grinded through it. And to see him performing at his norm is just electric.”
Bundle together deGrom’s four injury-plagued seasons — 2021 through 2024 with New York and Texas — and you get an absolutely ridiculous stretch of 35 starts, with a 2.01 ERA, 307 strikeouts and 24 walks in 197 1/3 innings.
Count that as one season. Add it to the seven standout years that preceded it and the 2025 renaissance, and deGrom might make the Hall of Fame, after all. He’s still throwing hard (98 mph in the seventh inning on Friday) and holding hitters to a .194 average.
“You find out you’re going to miss some significant time, and at my age, I was like ‘OK, there is unknown,’” said deGrom, who is 37.
“When it first happens, you’re pretty down, and then I was like, ‘Hey, there’s only one thing I can do, and that’s do what I can each day to try to get back to a major-league mound.’ The rehab process is long — that’s the second one I’ve been through for elbow surgery — so I just tried to do my best I could every day, with the goal of pitching back at the major-league level and at the level that I wanted to compete at.”
This start was special. deGrom’s parents were here, as well as his sisters, his wife and his children. They saw him on top again, healthy and happy and hopeful. He’d like to play five more years.
“Yeah, why not?” deGrom said. “I try to keep it going. I enjoy playing this game. I think when you do miss that significant time later in your career, you really realize how much you do miss it.”
The Mets sure miss him, too.
(Top photo: Ishika Samant / Getty Images)