Sometimes you just gotta deliver the good yourself

Jacob DeGrom has the best ERA in major league baseball as of today. And that’s after letting up 3 runs last night. He may be the best pitcher in the National League at this moment. Oh, and he has a losing record. Yes, Jake has a losing record because his team (and mine) the Mets just seem to not be able to score any runs in support of his efforts. It may boggle the mind to see this happening to such a talented pitcher, but if you’re a Mets fan of a certain age, you’ve seen this scenario before. With one Tom Terrific, the Franchise, Tom Seaver.

Seaver was dominant in his prime. It’s probably hard for today’s fans to appreciate this because, in Tom’s era, they didn’t keep all of the detailed stats that baseball fans (except me) seem to thrive on today. But Tom Seaver was the main reason so many of us Mets fans kept watching during the dark days of, oh, 1970 to 1979 (with 1973 being, as of August, the exception). Seaver was the best at what he did. But the Mets, much like today’s Mets, couldn’t make it work for him. Over his tenure, the Mets won one World Series (1969) and appeared in one more (the improbably 1973 World Series). That’s it, as far as team success goes. DeGrom has a similar pedigree - one losing World Series appearance in 2015 - which really was no fault of his own. The big difference between the two, however, was that Tom Seaver managed to post a winning record during his time with the Mets (‘74 he was 11-11, but that’s good enough for me). In my opinion, the reason he had a winning record so much of the time (and posted a good number of losses AND didn’t have DeGrom-like ERAs) was because he pitched so damned much. Between 1970 and 1976 (his last full season with the Mets), he pitched 96 complete games. 96!! Which means he had a lot of opportunities for his team to come back late in a game while he was still pitcher of record AND he had a lot of opportunities to keep his team’s bullpen from blowing a game that he might have left with the lead. Compare that to DeGrom. He has - wait for it - 2 complete games in his career. 2. Let me say it again, just to make it sink in. TWO! So the most dominant pitcher in the Mets stable has let, basically, his bullpen decide his fate more often than not. Way more often. It’s like being a chef, a great chef, a 5-star chef, cook her ass off in the kitchen and then having the wait staff drop 6 out of 10 trays of food to the floor, leaving the diners hungry. At some point, you probably wouldn’t blame the chef for delivering the damned food herself to each and every table. Which basically is what Seaver did. He delivered himself to victory - or defeat - way more often than not. And he did it all for 20 years. And 171 complete games. And no Tommy John surgery. Which might be a message to one Mr. DeGrom. Maybe it’s time for you to start delivering your own food to the table, take the reigns, and leave the bullpen to blow somebody else’s games.