Jacob deGrom, Command God

Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images

In the introduction to their 2023 Saberseminar presentation, Scott Powers and Vicente Iglesias hit on a fundamental truth about pitching: The variable that bests predicts the outcome of a pitch is the location where it crosses the plate. For a case study, look no further than this tweet from MLB.com’s David Adler about Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s splitters.

If Yamamoto buries his splitter arm side, he’s probably getting a whiff. If it’s on the edge of the zone, it’s likely a foul ball. If it catches plate, it’s getting put in play. The location dictates the outcome.

Given this truth, pitchers who command the ball best ought to dominate. But there’s a catch. As Powers and Iglesias noted, the location is also the variable with the least predictive reliability. If you see a pitcher throw a fastball 98 mph, you can be pretty sure he is going to do it again. A dotted backdoor slider, on the other hand, does not guarantee an entire game of dotted backdoor sliders. Command is both the most important and the least reliable quality for a pitcher.

Scott Powers and Vicente Iglesias, 2023 Saberseminar

Nobody can nail the corners with every pitch. But pitchers can at least minimize the variance of their locations, finding relative reliability within the chaos of command. And in 2025, there is perhaps nobody more reliable than Jacob deGrom.

deGrom’s flat attack angle fastball and firm slider have (justifiably) built his reputation as a stuff monster. Even after easing up on the gas pedal this season, deGrom is still a darling in the eyes of the models. His overall Stuff+ is in the 80th percentile for starters with at least 30 innings pitched, fueled by his depth-y 89-mph slider. PitchingBot likes deGrom even more, ranking him in the top 10 among those pitchers. Over at Baseball Prospectus, the StuffPro model believes deGrom wields four pitches — his curveball and changeup, in addition to the heater and slider — that all grade out as plus.

But stuff is no longer deGrom’s carrying tool. Possibly as a function of his decision to throw slower, possibly as a positive outcome of aging, deGrom’s standout skill these days is his command.

deGrom’s unbelievable precision came to my attention while writing about Hunter Gaddis for a piece that was published on Monday. As part of my effort to discern whether Gaddis owed his early-season success to slider command (the verdict: inconclusive), I created a version of the Kirby Index for sliders to see where he landed. That metric measured the variance in release angles and release points and distilled those figures into a single score that captured command ability. Originally, it was designed for fastballs, which tend to be thrown to all parts of the strike zone. It perhaps works even better for sliders, which generally are thrown to fewer targets. Gaddis’ rank among his fellow pitchers was nothing remarkable, but deGrom’s name sitting at the very top caught my attention.

Kirby Index (Sliders)
Player Name VRA Pctl HRA Pctl Vert. Release Pctl Horiz. Release Pctl Kirby Index
Jacob deGrom 99th 97th 91st 79th 0.94
Merrill Kelly 97th 77th 78th 97th 0.89
Zac Gallen 97th 82nd 92nd 39th 0.84
Taijuan Walker 90th 66th 92nd 76th 0.82
Zack Littell 87th 96th 88th 17th 0.80
Jack Flaherty 94th 92nd 3rd 78th 0.76
Reese Olson 93rd 56th 49th 93rd 0.76
Scott Blewett 73rd 61st 95th 83rd 0.75
Corbin Burnes 92nd 90th 3rd 82nd 0.75
Bryce Elder 81st 99th 59th 28th 0.75
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Minimum 50 sliders thrown to right-handed hitters.

As I wrote earlier this year, a more straightforward implementation of the Kirby Index would be to just measure the variance of the actual pitch locations. For this story, I calculated the standard deviation of the vertical and horizontal locations of a given pitcher’s sliders; once again, deGrom found himself at the top of the pack. Look at how much distance there is between him and the next closest pitcher:

Location Variation (sliders)
Player Name Horizontal Location (St Dev) Vertical Location (St Dev) Overall (St Dev)
Jacob deGrom 0.525 0.498 0.724
Merrill Kelly 0.595 0.586 0.835
Zac Gallen 0.616 0.565 0.836
Corbin Burnes 0.556 0.671 0.871
Jack Flaherty 0.575 0.659 0.874
Bryce Elder 0.514 0.713 0.879
Zack Littell 0.574 0.719 0.920
Luarbert Arias 0.543 0.755 0.930
Enyel De Los Santos 0.732 0.619 0.959
Dylan Lee 0.493 0.827 0.962
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Minimum 50 sliders thrown to right-handed hitters.

Random tangent here, but you have to admire Luarbert Arias for refusing to throw his junky 82-mph slider anywhere but inside the strike zone.

Anyway, measuring location densities, ultimately, could just point at pitchers who fill up the strike zone; the real test of command is a pitcher’s ability to hit his actual target. To that end, Driveline Baseball provided me with a sample of their proprietary miss distance data. Using Inside Edge tracking data, Driveline measures the distance from the intended target to the actual location of the pitch.

No surprise — deGrom’s slider miss distance ranked first among all pitchers. The league-average miss distance for sliders is about 12.5 inches; this year, deGrom is missing his target by under nine inches, nearly three standard deviations below the average. Any way you slice it, deGrom is commanding his slider like no one else in the sport.

The outcomes have been unassailable. So far, deGrom’s slider has returned a run value of -3.2 per 100 pitches thrown, the best mark for any slider thrown by a starting pitcher. Not only is he getting a bunch of swing and miss — a 38.1% whiff rate, as of this writing — it’s also grabbing a ton of called strikes. When batters do manage to put it in play, they can’t do much with it. The average launch angle on the pitch is just 2°; the xwOBA is a meek .227.

The harmless outcomes on balls in play are a function of deGrom’s targets. To right-handed hitters, he targets the classic low-away corner, breaking off the plate. Note the bimodal distribution on the heatmap — there’s a large concentration of sliders he’ll throw in the zone for strikes, and then another cluster right below the zone that generate chase.

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

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

To lefties, deGrom shows a similar bimodal distribution, but the pattern appears reversed. In early counts, he’s aiming just below the zone; in late counts, he’s looking for called strikes. This sequence to Athletics rookie Nick Kurtz, which featured four sliders, gives a sense of the approach. On 1-0 and 2-0, deGrom tries to bait a chase, but the big lefty resists.



Down 3-0, deGrom fires a middle-middle heater in an auto-take scenario, then returns to the slider in a 3-1 count. Here, deGrom dials in his robotic precision, dotting the lower edge of the strike zone to bring the count full.

On 3-2, he goes there again. Kurtz takes it and pays the price. Though the superimposed strike zone on the broadcast says this pitch is just low, my sense is he deserves that call; if he’s consistently landing pitches within inches of his intended target, you sort of just have to hand it to him.

deGrom isn’t just painting with the slider. I calculated the Kirby Index for four-seam fastballs thrown to righties in 2025; incredibly, he also sits in first place on that list.

Kirby Index (Fastballs)
Player Name VRA Pctl HRA Pctl Vert. Release Pctl Horiz. Release Pctl Kirby Index
Jacob deGrom 92nd 73rd 96th 94th 0.88
Bailey Ober 91st 99th 56th 72nd 0.85
Bryan King 95th 63rd 89th 81st 0.83
Spencer Schwellenbach 90th 95th 44th 88th 0.83
Trevor Williams 99th 56th 57th 92nd 0.80
Aaron Nola 83rd 91st 59th 68th 0.79
Joe Ross 96th 90th 43rd 50th 0.79
Ryan Gusto 70th 89th 76th 72nd 0.77
Colin Rea 86th 83rd 60th 52nd 0.76
Elvin Rodriguez 76th 78th 79th 55th 0.74
Kyle Freeland 88th 94th 18th 63rd 0.74
A.J. Puk 90th 54th 51st 91st 0.74
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Minimum 50 fastballs thrown to right-handed hitters.

As nice as it would be to think that deGrom can be just as good even after dropping two ticks off the fastball, it just isn’t true. Absent improvement elsewhere, losing stuff will bring him back to Earth. But deGrom is far from stagnant. In 2019 — his last full big league season, amid the most dominant phase of his career — his fastball command measured as below average by miss distance. Six years later, it’s hard to argue his command is anything but 80-grade. And as long as the elbow cooperates, it will help him defy gravity.





Michael Rosen is a transportation researcher and the author of pitchplots.substack.com. He can be found on Twitter at @bymichaelrosen.

12 Comments
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kamala2028
4 hours ago

Countdown to injury. 3:2;1

david k
4 hours ago
Reply to  kamala2028

C’mon man, don’t rain on the parade. I know it’s tempting to do this for guys like him and Trout, but….

carterMember since 2020
4 hours ago
Reply to  kamala2028

He’s intentionally throwing slower. Earlier in the year he was throwing slower than now, more like 96, but then he realized how much better his fastball performs at 97-98 so he has added a bit of velocity back. These are all conscious decisions, so I feel like at least for one year he’s a decent bet for a strong season w the TJ honeymoon phase.

kamala2028
4 hours ago
Reply to  carter

Probably off the juice now

David KleinMember since 2024
4 hours ago
Reply to  kamala2028

Competing with yourself for the worst comment?

kamala2028
3 hours ago
Reply to  David Klein

I must have owned you in the past

Dmjn53
1 hour ago
Reply to  kamala2028

Username checks out