Jacob deGrom, Command God | FanGraphs Baseball

Within the introduction to their 2023 Saberseminar presentation, Scott Powers and Vicente Iglesias hit on a elementary fact about pitching: The variable that bests predicts the end result of a pitch is the placement the place it crosses the plate. For a case research, look no additional than this tweet from MLB.com’s David Adler about Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s splitters.

Hitters have swung 74 instances at Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s splitter this season …

38 of these swings are whiffs (51%)

One other 17 are foul balls

That leaves 19 balls in play

18 of these 19 are floor balls (95%)

Just one of Yamamoto’s splitters has been hit within the air pic.twitter.com/ggLR1qHYZW

— David Adler (@_dadler) April 22, 2025

If Yamamoto buries his splitter arm aspect, he’s most likely getting a whiff. If it’s on the sting of the zone, it’s probably a foul ball. If it catches plate, it’s getting put in play. The situation dictates the end result.

Given this fact, pitchers who command the ball finest should dominate. However there’s a catch. As Powers and Iglesias famous, the placement can be the variable with the least predictive reliability. In case you see a pitcher throw a fastball 98 mph, you will be fairly certain he’s going to do it once more. A dotted backdoor slider, however, doesn’t assure a whole sport of dotted backdoor sliders. Command is each crucial and the least dependable high quality for a pitcher.

No one can nail the corners with each pitch. However pitchers can at the very least reduce the variance of their areas, discovering relative reliability inside the chaos of command. And in 2025, there may be maybe no person extra dependable than Jacob deGrom.

deGrom’s flat assault angle fastball and agency slider have (justifiably) constructed his status as a stuff monster. Even after easing up on the gasoline pedal this season, deGrom remains to be a darling within the eyes of the fashions. His general Stuff+ is within the eightieth percentile for starters with at the very least 30 innings pitched, fueled by his depth-y 89-mph slider. PitchingBot likes deGrom much more, rating him within the prime 10 amongst these pitchers. Over at Baseball Prospectus, the StuffPro mannequin believes deGrom wields 4 pitches — his curveball and changeup, along with the heater and slider — that every one grade out as plus.

However stuff is not deGrom’s carrying instrument. Presumably as a perform of his determination to throw slower, presumably as a optimistic end result of growing older, deGrom’s standout talent today is his command.

deGrom’s unbelievable precision got here to my consideration whereas writing about Hunter Gaddis for a chunk that was revealed on Monday. As a part of my effort to discern whether or not Gaddis owed his early-season success to slider command (the decision: inconclusive), I created a model of the Kirby Index for sliders to see the place he landed. That metric measured the variance in launch angles and launch factors and distilled these figures right into a single rating that captured command capacity. Initially, it was designed for fastballs, which are typically thrown to all components of the strike zone. It maybe works even higher for sliders, which usually are thrown to fewer targets. Gaddis’ rank amongst his fellow pitchers was nothing exceptional, however deGrom’s title sitting on the very prime caught my consideration.

As I wrote earlier this yr, a extra easy implementation of the Kirby Index could be to only measure the variance of the particular pitch areas. For this story, I calculated the usual deviation of the vertical and horizontal areas of a given pitcher’s sliders; as soon as once more, deGrom discovered himself on the prime of the pack. Take a look at how a lot distance there may be between him and the following closest pitcher:

Random tangent right here, however you need to admire Luarbert Arias for refusing to throw his junky 82-mph slider anyplace however contained in the strike zone.

Anyway, measuring location densities, finally, may simply level at pitchers who replenish the strike zone; the actual take a look at of command is a pitcher’s capacity to hit his precise goal. To that finish, Driveline Baseball offered me with a pattern of their proprietary miss distance information. Utilizing Inside Edge monitoring information, Driveline measures the gap from the meant goal to the precise location of the pitch.

No shock — deGrom’s slider miss distance ranked first amongst all pitchers. The league-average miss distance for sliders is about 12.5 inches; this yr, deGrom is lacking his goal by underneath 9 inches, almost three normal deviations under the typical. Any method you slice it, deGrom is commanding his slider like nobody else within the sport.

The outcomes have been unassailable. Up to now, deGrom’s slider has returned a run worth of -3.2 per 100 pitches thrown, the perfect mark for any slider thrown by a beginning pitcher. Not solely is he getting a bunch of swing and miss — a 38.1% whiff price, as of this writing — it’s additionally grabbing a ton of known as strikes. When batters do handle to place it in play, they will’t do a lot with it. The common launch angle on the pitch is simply 2°; the xwOBA is a meek .227.

The innocent outcomes on balls in play are a perform of deGrom’s targets. To right-handed hitters, he targets the basic low-away nook, breaking off the plate. Notice the bimodal distribution on the heatmap — there’s a big focus of sliders he’ll throw within the zone for strikes, after which one other cluster proper under the zone that generate chase.

These intentions will be seen within the filtered heatmap clusters. When deGrom throws sliders to righties in zero-strike counts, he tends to be within the zone:

In two-strike counts, he chases the swing and miss:

To lefties, deGrom exhibits an identical bimodal distribution, however the sample seems reversed. In early counts, he’s aiming just under the zone; in late counts, he’s in search of known as strikes. This sequence to Athletics rookie Nick Kurtz, which featured 4 sliders, offers a way of the strategy. On 1-0 and 2-0, deGrom tries to bait a chase, however the huge lefty resists.

Down 3-0, deGrom fires a middle-middle heater in an auto-take situation, then returns to the slider in a 3-1 depend. Right here, deGrom dials in his robotic precision, dotting the decrease fringe of the strike zone to convey the depend full.

On 3-2, he goes there once more. Kurtz takes it and pays the worth. Although the superimposed strike zone on the published says this pitch is simply low, my sense is he deserves that decision; if he’s persistently touchdown pitches inside inches of his meant goal, you form of simply have handy it to him.

deGrom isn’t simply portray with the slider. I calculated the Kirby Index for four-seam fastballs thrown to righties in 2025; extremely, he additionally sits in first place on that listing.

As good as it could be to assume that deGrom will be simply nearly as good even after dropping two ticks off the fastball, it simply isn’t true. Absent enchancment elsewhere, dropping stuff will convey him again to Earth. However deGrom is way from stagnant. In 2019 — his final full huge league season, amid essentially the most dominant section of his profession — his fastball command measured as under common by miss distance. Six years later, it’s onerous to argue his command is something however 80-grade. And so long as the elbow cooperates, it would assist him defy gravity.