SEATTLE -- The first inning was strenuous.
Rangers ace Jacob deGrom took the mound on Friday and quickly was faced with a bases-loaded jam of his own making after a pair of walks -- including a 10-pitch battle with Josh Naylor -- and a double from Mariners star Julio Rodríguez.
“I was thinking, ‘You've got to do something here to us out of this,’” deGrom said. “Especially because we scored in the first with the [Brandon] Nimmo home run. The last thing you want to do is go out there and give up a run right away. I was trying to do my best to prevent them from scoring.”
But he buckled down, striking out both Randy Arozarena and Luke Raley to keep the Mariners off the board.
deGrom was far from perfect. But even when deGrom doesn’t quite have it, he’s still Jacob deGrom.
“It was like, ‘All right, the bases are loaded, so you've got to do something,’” deGrom said. “I was hoping for a ground-ball double play. I got the strikeout there, and then was able to get another one. The first inning was tough, but we were able to get out of there with a zero.”
The Rangers’ ace dealt four scoreless innings in another low-scoring affair between the two American League West rivals as Texas came out on top with a 5-0 victory at T-Mobile Park. deGrom threw just 88 pitches in those four innings, but the 30-pitch first was load-bearing. While he didn't allow any runs, he had some traffic and deep counts in every frame.
“I don’t know, I kind of felt like I was all over the place,” deGrom said. “I didn't feel as good as I felt in the Dodgers start, as far as stuff. I just wasn't locating as well. A lot of deep counts, foul balls, the 30 pitches in the first. It was a little bit of a grind. But we walked away with a W.”
deGrom is a notoriously tough self-critic and he has no problem admitting when it isn’t his best day.
When the stuff isn’t sharp, you have to do something to figure out how to lock in for as long as possible. deGrom admits that he couldn't locate his fastball well at all -- he got just four called strikes with it, and five whiffs on 19 swings -- and the slider was starting much higher than he would’ve liked.
That combination led to the Mariners’ ability to foul off so many pitches and extend at-bats. But it also led to a higher curveball usage than typical (9% compared to a 2.4% average).
“It was just something a little bit slower to keep them off balance,” deGrom said. “Danny [Jansen] did a good job of mixing that in when we needed to. We were fortunate enough that it worked.”
Maybe the bigger story of the night was the unsung heroes of the bullpen shouldering the final five innings of work against a tough Mariners team.
Rookie Gavin Collyer (1 1/3 IP), Tyler Alexander (2/3 IP), Jalen Beeks (1 IP), Cole Winn (1 IP) and Jacob Latz (1 IP) combined to allow just two hits and three walks over the final five frames, completing the shutout. Collyer collected his first MLB win.
“It was just a tough night for [deGrom], just grinding it through that game,” manager Skip Schumaker said. “The pitch count in the first inning drove up and he just couldn't really recover. He still gave us four shutout innings. But we had to cover a lot of innings in the bullpen. Jacob was grinding through it. He didn't feel great the whole night and for a bullpen to come in and do what they did against a really tough team was really impressive.”