ARLINGTON — Around 1:36 p.m. Sunday afternoon, under a bright blue sky if the good lord is willing, Jacob deGrom will stride seemingly effortlessly to the mound at Globe Life Field just as the soulful opening guitar riff of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” echoes through the park.
Over two minutes, as he runs through his warmup routine, the arpeggiated chord sequence will fade behind the late Ronnie Van Zant’s voice and the tribute to lessons learned from his mother in a different era in Jacksonville, Fla.
If this goes anything like it did for nearly a decade in New York, the crowd will offer a booming sing-a-long with the chorus.
Be a simple kind of man
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Oh, be something you love and understand
The result: An awe-inspiring, mood-setting kind of moment, that just might bring a little extra intimidation to the fact the Boston Red Sox are about to face a pitching freak. A nice little added benefit, not that it’s deGrom’s intention. The song is more pitching instructional audio than anything else.
“Keep it simple,” deGrom said this week. “One pitch at a time. It really plays to what I’m kind of trying to do out there.”
There is a certain level of contradiction there. How can what deGrom does be simple? Throws the fastball at 97, at 100 if he’s feeling chippy. That’s for starters. He backs it up with a slider at 91-92 mph, spinning more than 2,500 RPM. In the 15-year Statcast Era, there have been eight occasions when a starting pitcher has averaged 90 mph and 2,500 RPMs with the slider. Degrom has authored five of them. Now, just for kicks, he’s fooling around with a curveball, you know, just to further humiliate hitters.
You know the results, although so few have occurred in a Rangers uniform, because of elbow ligament reconstruction surgery that cost him the last five months of 2023 and the first five of 2024. In New York, there were back-to-back Cy Youngs. Over the last 100 years, among pitchers with at least 200 starts, he has the second lowest ERA (Highland Park’s Clayton Kershaw, at 2.52, is two-hundredths of a run better). DeGrom is first in strikeout-to-walk rate and WHIP. It’s all historic stuff. It ain’t simple.
And when he talks pitching, it sounds anything but simple. He is in tune with his shoulder level and can feel when it is off ever-so-slightly on delivery. He can get “too rotational” on his slider. Imperceptible to most, but egregiously off to him.
“There’s a few more layers to Jacob than just ‘simple’ or that he lets on,” pitching coach Mike Maddux said. “But his mantra out there is to keep it simple in this way: He knows what he can do and doesn’t worry about what hitters are going to do or anything else.”
Said deGrom: “What I’m trying to do may be complex, but I try to take the simplest approach to solving it. To simplify it. OK, let’s see how many times I can hit the glove.”
DeGrom said he’s still fighting the tendency to get “too rotational,” to turn his hips too much on the slider. He spent his last preseason bullpen working on it.
“So, try to lock it in and go,” he said.
Rangers fans have had only six opportunities to watch the Simple Man in person, only once in the last 23 months. He pitched three innings against Seattle last September as he finished off his elbow rehab.
They, too, really haven’t gotten into rhythm with deGrom’s music. But in an era when hitters and pitchers change their walkup/warmup music so often, they might as well come with their own Spotify list, deGrom’s predictability has created an aura. Think Trevor Hoffman entering to “Hell’s Bells,” or Mariano Rivera to “Enter Sandman.”
Hoffman’s entrance in 1998 with San Diego, with Bruce Bochy as manager, essentially created the walkup/warmup genre. It was the idea of a Padres salesperson, perhaps borrowing from Charlie Sheen’s “Wild Thing,” entry in Major League. Whatever, it had the proper effect: Intimidation at the end of a game.
“It was genius,” Bochy said. “It charged up the fans and probably Trevor and the team. We loved it because the park got so loud. The place would just erupt.”
Now, imagine it at the start of a game.
“It’s one of the greatest, most iconic moments,” Kevin Pillar, who witnessed it 10 times as deGrom’s Mets teammate in 2021, said of the warmup scene. “There was nothing like it — like you were about to witness history every time.”
They kind of did. In 115 starts at home, whether Citi Field or the six in Arlington, deGrom has a 2.16 ERA, a 0.91 WHIP, 11.70 strikeouts per nine innings and 5.69 strikeouts per walk. According to Baseball-Reference, it’s a clean sweep. He leads every one of those categories for pitchers with at least 100 home starts in the last 100 years.
He’s done it by keeping it simple, just like the song says.
Ranger fans would be happy to serenade him with encore after encore.
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