Jacob deGrom recorded his 2,000th career strikeout on Thursday against the Washington Nationals. He is 38. He got there in 1,660 and a third innings across 272 starts, second only to Chris Sale, who needed 1,626. Yu Darvish, who previously held second place, took 1,697 and a third.
His manager, Skip Schumaker, said it was "vintage deGrom". DeGrom, asked about the milestone, gave the answer he generally gives: "Maybe whenever my career is over I'll look at that kind of stuff. But even when the season's over, I'm like, 'I've got to figure out a way to get outs the following year.'"
The arithmetic behind the record
For readers who do not follow baseball closely, the distinction here is worth spelling out, because "second fastest to 2,000" measures something narrower than "second best."
A strikeout is one of three ways a pitcher can retire a batter without the ball being put in play. Most pitchers accumulate strikeout totals the way most people accumulate anything: slowly, over a very long time. The all-time leaders are men who pitched for two decades and threw four or five thousand innings.
Ranking by innings instead of by years asks a different question: not how many strikeouts, but how densely. To reach 2,000 in 1,660 innings, a pitcher must average close to eleven strikeouts per nine innings across his entire career, which is a rate that until recently almost nobody sustained over more than a season or two.
There is a second, less flattering half to the arithmetic. A pitcher rises on this particular list either by striking out an extraordinary share of the hitters he faces or by throwing very few innings. DeGrom has done both. He has been among the most dominant pitchers of his generation, and he has also missed enormous stretches of it.
The career
DeGrom came up with the New York Mets in 2014 and won Rookie of the Year. In 2018 and 2019 he won consecutive National League Cy Young Awards, the sport's award for its best pitcher, the first of those seasons behind an earned run average of 1.70 that stood well clear of the field.
Then the injuries. Elbow and arm trouble cost him most of two seasons in New York. He signed with Texas before the 2023 season and made six starts before requiring a second Tommy John surgery, the elbow ligament reconstruction that typically costs a pitcher a full year. He watched from rehabilitation as the Rangers won the World Series.
He is 9-8 with a 3.77 earned run average this season, which is a good year rather than a peak one, and the fact that he is producing a good year at 38 after two elbow reconstructions is the actual achievement underneath the round number.
What the number does not settle
Milestones like this invite an argument about where a player ranks, and this one does not resolve it. A career of 2,000 strikeouts in 1,660 innings is a statement about quality per inning. It is silent on durability, which is also part of what a pitcher is for, and deGrom's record there is poor through no fault of his own.
The honest summary is that he has been as good as anyone alive when able to take the ball, and able to take it far less often than his talent deserved. Thursday's strikeout is a precise measurement of the first half of that sentence.
