The King and deGrom
Felix Hernández and Jacob deGrom are close enough in age that they could have played on the same high school team. Felix was born on April 8, 1986. deGrom was born about two years and two months later, on June 19, 1988. In a different world, Felix could have been the senior ace on deGrom’s Calvary Christian Academy high school team when deGrom was a sophomore playing shortstop.
In our world, Felix signed with the Seattle Mariners as a 16-year-old prospect from Venezuela on July 4, 2002, after having been scouted by the Mariners since he was 14. A year after signing with the Mariners, Felix was pitching in the short-season Northwest League with the Everett Aquasox—where he struck out 73 batters in 55 innings despite being four years younger than the average player at that level. He was then bumped up to A-ball for two impressive starts with the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers. It was during his tenure with the Aquasox that he was first referred to as “King Felix” in this post at the USS Mariner website.
All hail King Felix. Hernandez worked five innings last night against Spokane, allowing just one run on two hits and striking out five. He also walked four, but it’s important to remember that he’s only 17 and facing much older competition, including some college players. I’m trying not to get too excited about him, but it’s difficult not to with the way he’s pitched so far.
-USS Mariner Comment Section, 2003
It would take another seven years before the Mariners created the King’s Court area of Safeco Field, where fans wearing blue and gold shirts and holding up “K” cards chanted for their king to rack up strikeouts. Long before those must-see starts, Felix rocketed through the minor leagues in 2004, then made his major league debut in August of 2005, at the age of 19. After 12 strong starts in his rookie year (2.67 ERA. 1.00 WHIP in 84.3 IP), he became a fixture in the rotation as a 20-year-old in 2006.
While Felix was making his way through the minors and establishing himself in the major leagues, deGrom was excelling at baseball and basketball in high school. He was MVP of his teams in both sports, was First Team All-Conference in baseball, and helped his team win the American Legion State Championship in 2006.
Despite his success, deGrom went undrafted out of high school and enrolled at Stetson University, where he played shortstop during his freshman and sophomore seasons. He first appeared on the mound for Stetson in May of 2009. That fall, Stetson began to use him as a reliever in addition to his shortstop position and he developed into one of the team’s best pitchers. By the halfway point of his junior season, he was in the starting rotation.
In June of 2010, the New York Mets selected deGrom in the 9th round of the MLB Amateur Draft and he subsequently made six starts for the Kingsport Mets in the Appalachian League as a 22-year-old, where he had a 5.19 ERA in 26 innings despite being three years older than the average age of the players at that level. His season ended when he was diagnosed with a partial tear of the UCL that resulted in Tommy John surgery, which caused him to miss the entire 2011 season.
Despite being just two years apart in age, King Felix and Jacob deGrom were a world apart in professional experience at the end of the 2011 season. Felix had blossomed into the staff ace of the Mariners in 2009, when he made the AL All-Star team for the first time and finished second in AL Cy Young voting. In 2010, he won the AL Cy Young Award when he led the league in starts, innings pitched, and ERA. He was an All-Star again in 2011 after pitching another 233.7 innings with a better-than-league-average ERA.
Felix’s Cy Young season in 2010 came during a 10-year stretch from 2006 to 2015 in which he averaged 32 starts and 218 innings per year, with a 3.13 ERA. He led all pitchers in FanGraphs Wins Above Replacement (WAR) during this time. For many years, particularly after Ichiro left, he was the best thing about the Mariners. Some years, he was the only good thing about the team, as he was often at his best when the team was at its worst. The year he won the Cy Young, the Mariners were 61-101. When he pitched the 23rd perfect game in MLB history on August 15, 2012, it was for a team that finished the year in last place in the AL West, at 75-87.
This was not uncommon for the Mariners during this time. Felix has provided numerous highlights over the years, but the Mariners have infamously not made the postseason since 2001, an unenviable streak that extended the entirety of his career in Seattle. Still, no matter how bad they were or how many years they went without making the playoffs, the Mariners had “The King” pitching every five days and fans flocked to his starts so they could see greatness in person.
On the other side of the country, Jacob deGrom returned from Tommy John surgery to pitch in A and High-A in 2012, then progressed all the way up to Triple-A in 2013. He started the 2014 season in Triple-A before making his big league debut on May 15. At the time, he was about to turn 26, wasn’t a highly-regarded prospect, had not appeared on the assorted top-100 prospects lists, and had a 3.59 ERA in 326.3 minor league innings, which included a 2.58 ERA in seven starts in Triple-A the year of his major league debut.
His first start was on a Thursday night at Citi Field against the New York Yankees in front of 40,000 fans and he was very good, allowing just one run in seven innings. Alas, the Mets lost the game 1-0, which would be a recurring theme a few years later. deGrom made 22 starts with a 2.69 ERA and won the NL Rookie of the Year Award. He followed that up with his first All-Star selection in 2015.
A snapshot of the careers of Felix Hernández and Jacob deGrom through 2015 shows a longtime ace coming off another impressive season juxtaposed with a pitcher just two years younger who only had 52 MLB starts on his resume.
Since 1901, there have been 11 pitchers with 50 or more Wins Above Replacement (WAR, FanGraphs version) through their age 29 season. Felix Hernández is eighth on this list (see below). The other ten include seven Hall of Famers plus Roger Clemens, Clayton Kershaw, and Dwight Gooden. Clemens is Hall of Fame worthy based on his overwhelming statistical record, but failed to be elected by the BBWAA for other reasons. When the time comes, Kershaw should cruise right into the Hall of Fame as perhaps the best pitcher of his generation.
Sadly, as Mariner fans well know, the pitcher whose career most closely resembles Hernández’ career is Dwight Gooden. They were both very good pitchers at a young age who seemed to be on a Hall of Fame track, but faded out in their 30s. After earning 52.4 WAR through age 30, Gooden added just 4.3 WAR in the last five years of his career and finished with 56.7. He received 3.3% of the vote in his one-and-done year on the Hall of Fame ballot.
In 2016, at the age of 30, Felix had a 3.82 ERA, but the underlying numbers were not as rosy. His strikeout rate dropped by 4.5 percent and his walk rate increased by nearly 3 percent from the previous year, which contributed to a 4.63 FIP. The fastball that had once averaged 95 mph was down to 90.5 mph as all those innings he pitched in his 20s began to take their toll. In an injury-shortened 2017 season, his ERA shot up to 4.36, which was only the second time in his career up to that point that he had an ERA over 3.00. Despite his struggles, he and his legion of fans hoped he would return to form with an offseason of rest to get full healthy.
Unfortunately, while he was back on the mound for 28 starts in 2018, his 5.55 ERA was the second-highest in baseball for a pitcher with 150 or more innings. It only got worse in 2019 when he closed out his Mariners career with 15 starts and a 6.40 ERA. Still supportive to the very end, fans gave him a rousing sendoff in his emotional final start for the Mariners in September. He signed as a free agent with the Atlanta Braves in 2020 and with the Baltimore Orioles in 2021, but wasn’t healthy or effective enough to pitch for either team. Unless he comes back in 2022, his career will have ended with his age-33 season.
As Felix’ career was fading, deGrom’s was ascending. He had a 3-WAR season in 2016 and a 4-WAR season in 2017, then a career-best 9-WAR season in 2018, when he led the league with a 1.70 ERA in 217 innings and won his first of back-to-back NL Cy Young Awards. He won those Cy Youngs despite going 10-9 in 2018 and 11-8 in 2019. Before deGrom, the fewest wins in a season for a starting pitcher who won the Cy Young was 13 . . . by Felix Hernández in 2010.
deGrom continued his excellence in the shortened 2020 season (2.38 ERA in 68 innings), then reached the pinnacle of greatness with a 1.08 ERA in 92 innings in 2021. It was reminiscent of Bob Gibson’s 1968 season when Gibson had a 1.12 ERA over 34 starts, although deGrom made just 15 starts because of injuries.
With MLB owners having locked out the players in December, there’s no word on deGrom’s injury status this offseason. By rule, he’s not allowed to have contact with team personnel, including trainers and other medical professionals, so the status of his health likely won’t be known until the lockout ends and he gets back on the mound in the spring. He seems to be at the very top of his game based on last season, but he’ll be 34 years old in 2022 and his innings have been limited by two abbreviated seasons due to COVID-19 in 2020 and his injuries last year.
Felix Hernández is just two years older than Jacob deGrom, but the arcs of their careers make it seem as if they belong to different generations. Felix was so good so young that he earned 44.1 WAR before deGrom even reached the major leagues. Then, just as his star was fading, deGrom’s career took off. The chart below shows the WAR each earned in their individual seasons starting with the debut of Felix Hernández in 2005 to Jacob deGrom’s 2021 season.
If Felix is done, he finished his career with 54.0 WAR, which puts him 74th all-time. That’s in the neighborhood of Hall of Famer Jack Morris (55.8 WAR) and non-Hall of Famers Bret Saberhagen (55.3 WAR), Roy Oswalt (52.6 WAR), and Mark Buehrle (52.3 WAR). deGrom enters his age-34 season with 38.9 WAR and is seemingly at the top of his game (health status pending), but how will he age? Can he earn the 15-ish WAR needed over the remainder of his career to equal Felix? When all is said and done, it will be interesting to see how it turns out for two pitchers separated by two years in age but with very different career paths.
-Bobby Mueller
