Five-plus months remain in the regular season, but a boisterous crowd of 8,130 fans at Citi Field submitted their voice votes for MVP on Friday night.
Jacob deGrom, the elixir to all of the Mets’ recent woes, officially kicked his candidacy into gear in convincing fashion.
Once again, a dazzling deGrom did it all, striking out a career-high 15 batters in a complete game shutout and even jump-starting the offense in the Mets’ 6-0 win over the Nationals at Citi Field.
“He has to be from a different planet because he does things that seem out of this world,” center fielder Brandon Nimmo said. “He just commanded the whole game. He changed the game. He single-handedly won and changed the game.”
Serenaded with loud “MVP” chants throughout the late innings, deGrom gave up just two hits and retired the final 19 batters he faced while adding two hits of his own, including an RBI double to give himself a lead with which to work.
Through four starts, deGrom has driven in two runs, scored two runs and given up just one earned run. The right-hander now has 50 strikeouts in 29 innings, the most for any pitcher in MLB history through his first four starts of a season.
“We’re witnessing something special,” manager Luis Rojas said.
In each of his previous two starts before Friday, deGrom had fanned 14 batters, tying a career-high. He reached that threshold and then broke through it on back-to-back batters in the seventh inning as he struck out the side for the second straight frame.
“When I looked up there and saw 12, I was like, ‘OK, you gotta figure out a way to strike out three guys,’ ” said deGrom, who finished the masterpiece in an efficient 109 pitches.
Except deGrom was not even sure an outing like this was in store when he began throwing in the bullpen. He was almost too perfect. That made him “nervous,” he said, because some of the best starts in his career had been preceded by wild warm-ups in the bullpen.
Instead, the command carried over. His slider accounted for seven strikeouts, his changeup was the best he’s had “in a long time,” he said, and he was still hitting 100 mph with his fastball in the seventh inning.
“He was just being Jake. The guy’s unbelievable,” catcher Tomas Nido said. “I was just putting numbers down and he was hitting the spot.”
The game had been shaping up like an all-too-familiar deGrom start, in which he was quickly putting up zeroes on the scoreboard, only to have his own team do the same in the other half of the innings.
But deGrom took matters into his own hands in the fifth inning, roping an RBI double to left field for the 1-0 lead. He would have made that stand up by itself, but Nimmo added a two-run double later in the inning and then a two-run homer in the eighth — a two-run shot because two batters earlier, deGrom had stayed in to hit for himself, to the delight of the crowd, and singled.
“If we’re gonna be in the lineup, I feel like we might as well be a threat and try to do our best and put good swings on the ball,” said deGrom, who improved to 6-for-11 on the season. “I don’t want to be an easy out.”
The only easy outs were the ones deGrom was getting when he was on the mound. It led to his second career complete game shutout, the end of the Mets’ three-game losing streak and MVP chants filling Citi Field on a late April night.
“That was definitely cool,” deGrom said. “Obviously it’d be really cool to win MVP. So hopefully we’ll see if we can keep this thing going.”
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April 24, 2021 at 09:26AM
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