Jacob deGrom’s Record-Pace Bad Luck

Any Mets fan can tell you what a brutal season Jacob deGrom has had, though it might appear quite unlikely to the outsider. Look at his stats, after all: a 4-0 record, 1.52 ERA, 85 strikeouts and just 47 hits in 65 1/3 innings. That should put him on a pace to contend for the Cy Young Award, an achievement predicted for him in March by Ron Darling, who almost knows about such things.

Yet his bad luck has already reached historic proportions, only one-third of the way through the season. Let me tell you how bad it is.

Since back in the Dark Ages when I worked at the Hall of Fame, I’ve been compiling several massive studies of pitching usage and success, most going from the 1950s through some recent season. Two studies of starting pitchers are somewhat related, and both reflect what has happened to Jacob deGrom.

One I call the Blown Wins Study. That included all the big winners and seasons from 1955-2008, roughly from Sandy Koufax through Greg Maddux. I focused on the times when each starter left the game with the lead, as the “winning pitcher of record,” only to see the bullpen blow the win. For the record, the career leaders in Blown Wins is Roger Clemens, with 67, with Maddux the runner-up at 61.

The lowest Blown Wins totals were Koufax’s 13 and Bob Gibson’s 15; back then, the starter stayed in long enough to blow his own leads, thank you very much. Maddux and Clemens were often excused from further effort after six or seven innings, giving the bullpen more time to blow those leads.

The other study I call my “Big Pitchers” study only because of the million or two pieces of data I have assembled in it. It focuses on the place in an average game where the deployment of the starting pitcher has changed most dramatically during the past generation or so: the end of the 7th inning.

More precisely, the study covers every time a starting pitcher has worked seven innings and has a lead of three runs or less, the so-called “save situation” in which it has become increasingly automatic for managers to go to the bullpen. In fact, in the last decade this fulcrum has moved to the end of the 6th inning, requiring another study that is in its early stages.

Every time the starter faces the 8th inning with a small lead, I track whether he keeps pitching, what happens if he does, and what happens if and when he is relieved. The amazing (to me) thing I’ve discovered is that there is little change in the bottom line between the old-time strategy of expecting the starter to finish the game and the current vogue for parading relievers to the mound in the late innings. No matter how you slice it, no matter how hard a manager abuses his starters or falls in love with his bullpen, his team still holds such a lead about 85% of the time.

There’s a fair amount of correlation in the two studies regarding starting pitchers leaving the game with the lead but not getting the win. The “big” study simply limits the data to games when the starter worked at least seven innings. By contrast, of Clemens’ 67 blown wins, 22 came before the 8th inning, while for Maddux it was 16 of 61.

What does this have to do with Jacob deGrom? I’m getting there. Consider this. Looking at the 25 biggest winning pitchers from a half-century or so (515 individual seasons), I found just 35 in which a starting pitcher suffered as many as 5 blown wins in a season. Three times (Don Drysdale 1960, Phil Niekro 1973, and Maddux 2008), a starter was robbed of 7 wins by horrid bullpen work. Eleven times, there were 6 blown wins (twice each for Jim Kaat, Tommy John, and Tom Glavine, once each for Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Clemens, Niekro and Jamie Moyer. On 21 occasions, a starter had 5 blown wins in a season.

I looked at those 35 seasons to see how often the starter lasted seven innings. It happened 40.6% of the time; three times out of five, they didn’t last seven innings. Out of the 35 seasons, I found two in which the starter went seven innings five times, and four in which he did it four times. These were the winningest pitchers of two or three baseball generations, and only six times did they have as many as four games in a season in which they left after seven (plus) innings with a lead that was blown by the bullpen.

It has happened to Jacob deGrom four times already this season. In fact, all four occurred in a six-week period.

Amazingly, the two times a pitcher was victimized by his bullpen five times in a season, it was the same pitcher! That poor bastard was Jamie Moyer, first for the Baltimore Orioles in 1994 and reprising the feat with the 1999 Seattle Mariners. A youth of 31 in 1994, with only 46 of his 269 career victories on his resume, Moyer got 23 starts for the Orioles before the strike wiped out the last one-fourth of the season. Yet it lasted long enough for Moyer to endure this sad carnage:

1. April 24, vs. Seattle: Moyer led, 6-3, in the 8th inning when he left with the bases loaded. Three relievers later, Seattle had a 7-6 it managed to keep.
2. June 15, vs. New  York: Moyer left in the 8th inning with a 3-2 lead, two runners on, and one out. Reliever Jim Poole surrendered the lead before the Orioles rallied to win,
3. July 10, vs. Oakland: In seven innings, Moyer allowed just two hits, leaving with a 4-2 lead. Lee Smith got drilled for the game-winning home run in the 9th inning by Mark McGwire.
4. July 24, at Oakland: This time, he left after seven solid innings, but a 6-2 lead wasn’t enough. Four runs in the 8th inning tied it, and the A’s won it in the 9th.
5. August 3, at Minnesota: This time, manager Johnny Oates let Moyer pitch the 8th inning, and he was unscathed. Leading 3-2 to the bottom of the 9th, Oates opted for Lee Smith, who gave up two runs and lost.