It’s been the year of Jacob deGrom so often for most of the past decade that you’d think it would be hard to discern when it isn’t the year of Jacob deGrom. Jacob deGrom was named by this blog as the Richie Ashburn Most Valuable Met of 2014, 2017 and 2018. Jacob deGrom wasn’t named the Richie Ashburn Most Valuable Met of 2015, 2019 and 2020, but had he been, it wouldn’t have been a strenuous stretch. Considering his body of work from 2014, when deGrom snagged the National League Rookie of the Year award, through 2020, when deGrom vied valiantly right up to the end of the truncated season for his third consecutive National League Cy Young award, co-naming the MVM for Ashburn and deGrom wouldn’t have lunged beyond the limits of appropriate designation had we gone in that direction. Jacob deGrom had been that good for that long.

This year, though, 2021…this was really the year of Jacob deGrom.

It was the year Jacob deGrom was not only better than every other player on the Mets and every other pitcher on any team and perhaps every other player in the majors, it was the year Jacob deGrom immersed himself in the process of redefining “best” Metwise. Jacob deGrom in 2021 might have ascended to the status of the best Met there ever was. Gathering steam in the April cold and continuing past Independence Day, I was close to convinced that no Met — none — had ever been better. Consider deGrom’s second, third and fourth starts of the season, which are as emblematic of his pitching as his erstwhile flowing locks used to be of his silhouette.

• April 10: 8 innings at home versus the Marlins; 5 hits, 0 walks, 1 earned run allowed; 14 strikeouts.

• April 17: 6 innings in a Coors Field doubleheader of 7 innings apiece in the Rocky Mountain cold; 3 hits, 1 walk, 0 earned runs allowed; 14 strikeouts.

• April 23: 9 innings back at Citi Field against the Nationals; 2 hits, 0 walks, 0 earned runs allowed; 15 strikeouts, after which his ERA measured 0.31…and his batting average was .545.

The only thing that kept deGrom’s 2021 from donning a red cape and leaping tall buildings in a single bound thereafter was uneasiness about allowing it to take flight unencumbered. Jacob pitched as many as seven innings only three times following his trilogy of aforementioned masterpieces and topped 90 pitches only once in the process. Abundances of caution rather than opposition batsmen were the main obstacles deGrom faced from April until July. There was a brief detour to the IL in May and a couple of starts that definitely would have gone longer had the most precious natural resource in Flushing not been thought at stake. Fine, fine — you don’t mess around with Jake, we all agreed.

Had Jacob deGrom traveled to Denver for the All-Star Game to which he had been sanely selected, I had ready to go, at least in my head, an essay daring to assert that the Met we were about to watch step forward from a foul line and tip a cap to represent us at the Midsummer Classic might as well also be acknowledging that he was a Met practically without peer. A “today I am the greatest of all time” Rickey Henderson-style greeting is not Jacob deGrom’s tempo, yet by the middle of 2021, there was Jacob deGrom and, I swear, there was nobody else keeping him ethereal Metsian company a figurative mile above sea level.

Except for Tom Seaver, of course, whose transcendence as a Met is and always will be peerless, yet whose peak performance over an extended period of time in a Met uniform might very well have been on the verge of a teeny bit of eclipse.

For consistent episodic brilliance, maybe it had already been overshadowed.

Caveats like crazy should be applied in deference to the differences in the sport a half-century apart, particularly how pitching is managed, but consider that entering 1970, Tom Seaver was well-established as the ace of his staff and, across the next two seasons, ’70 and ’71, went out and threw 577 innings, yielding an earned run average of 2.29; and from 2018 through his final start of 2021, Jacob deGrom, well-established ace of his staff, threw 581 innings and yielded an earned run average of 1.94.

Caveats! Two seasons for Seaver versus four for deGrom; 40 complete games from Seaver versus two from deGrom; strikeout incidence in general way up fifty years later (774 for deGrom, 572 for Seaver); shifts; velocities; bullpens…

Even still.

I grew up idolizing Tom Seaver, but even as a starry-eyed kid, I understood it was possible that Tom Seaver might now and then have a slightly subpar start, was capable of giving up a couple of runs at the wrong time, could once in a great while be outpitched. At a much more advanced stage of my life, I couldn’t think the same of Jacob deGrom. I knew he didn’t win as often as Tom Seaver, I knew he rarely stayed in games for as many innings as Tom Seaver routinely did, and I knew there was only one Tom Seaver. But I also knew there was only one Jacob deGrom, and in my fifty-plus years of hanging on every pitch every Met throws, I never felt as continually confident that a Met was going to throw strikes and get outs as I had come to feel about Jacob deGrom.

That’s how good Jacob deGrom had been almost without pause since he came to the big leagues in 2014, since he had elevated himself above the crowd in 2018, since he somehow soared even higher in 2021. The numbers would have to take care of themselves over time, but in the moment, in the midst of an individual’s career arc and season like none other I’d experienced as a Mets fan, I was ready to admit to myself and out loud that even if no Met could ever be greater than Tom Seaver, maybe no Met had ever been better than Jacob deGrom.

His last start was on July 7. He wouldn’t be going to the All-Star Game on July 13. Despite our desire to display our jewel and remind the baseball world we had something nobody else could claim, his demurral made sense. Why waste energy on an exhibition? Rest up, Jakey. Be strong for the second half. With his recusal, my impetus to evaluate his stature diminished, so I held off.

After the All-Star break, Jacob deGrom’s next start was to be determined. His status was to be announced. His condition, inevitably, was to be confounding.

July 17: Jacob deGrom is experiencing tightness in his right forearm and has been shut down. An MRI didn’t show any structural damage.

July 18: Jacob deGrom goes on the 10-day injured list.

July 25: Jacob deGrom throws off a mound and is feeling good.

July 30: Jacob deGrom is shut down after additional inflammation is detected in his right elbow.

August 3: Jacob deGrom tells reporters his elbow inflammation is unrelated to his forearm tightness, adding he doesn’t believe he’ll miss the remainder of the season.

August 13: Jacob deGrom’s shutdown will continue at least two more weeks, according to Luis Rojas.

August 20: Jacob deGrom is transferred to the 60-day IL, retroactive to the middle of July, making room for the newly acquired Heath Hembree and implicitly acknowledging deGrom won’t be ready to come back until mid-September.

September 4: Jacob deGrom is reportedly 10 days away from beginning bullpen sessions after having played catch at a distance of 75 feet.

September 8: Jacob deGrom’s right UCL had the lowest-grade partial tear, according to Sandy Alderson, but the team now considers it “perfectly intact” after two months of not pitching.

September 9: Jacob deGrom releases a statement that pronounces his UCL “perfectly fine,” and indicates he will “continue to throw and build up and see where we end up,” even as it’s reported only “an outside chance” exists he will pitch again in 2021.

September 12: Jacob deGrom is scheduled to throw off a mound “maybe this week,” Rojas says.

September 26: Jacob deGrom reportedly might make one appearance before the season ends, given that a recent bullpen session went well.

Yet Jacob deGrom couldn’t properly end his season.

Nor could the 2021 Mets, I suppose, but they did have to keep grinding. Somebody had to keep pitching, and somebody did. Several bodies in particular. In more than one of every three games, five pitchers each kept showing up, kept taking the ball and kept the Mets as competitive as they could have possibly been. Collectively, they were in our faces nearly daily and nightly, but their successes were easy to look past. It’s their less frequent failures that more readily grab our attention.

Hence, with deGrom sidelined through the second half, Faith and Fear in Flushing makes a call to the bullpen and chooses as its Richie Ashburn Most Valuable Met of 2021, Aaron Loup and the Oft-Used Troupe. Our winners are advised (as Corbin Burnes upon capturing the Cy Young should have been), to take a page from the winter 1976 night a self-aware Paul Simon won the Grammy for Best Album — “I’d like to thank Stevie Wonder, who didn’t make an album this year” — and send a note of gratitude to Jake for having ceased pitching on July 7.

To clarify, this year’s Ashburn goes primarily to Aaron Loup, who appeared on a Mets mound 65 times and recorded an ERA lower than deGrom’s, but with ample space on the plaque for his band of bullpen brothers who, like him, pitched in well over one-third of all Mets games in the past year: Miguel Castro (69 appearances), Trevor May (68), Jeurys Familia (65) and Edwin Diaz (63). Loup is the headliner here, but his comrades are also worthy of commendation. They worked through adversity, they persevered often against popular opinion, they handled multiple roles as asked and they did quite a bit of coming through.

In a day and age when every relief pitcher is considered by management a fungible token, ready to be exchanged at a moment’s notice for whoever else has options or happens to be spotted on a waiver wire, these five were relied upon as individuals from season’s start to the season’s end. Only Familia served a standard IL stint, and he returned within two weeks. Castro spent a couple of days in COVID protocol and then was back. Diaz took a couple of days to celebrate the birth of his second son. Loup and May were the only two Mets to never leave the active roster.

The Mets played 162 games. In 143 games, one to five of these relievers who pitched between 63 and 69 times were part of the box score. Sly Stone would have dubbed them everyday people. The Mets were a winning team when we saw one or members of the Troupe in action, going 73-70. In only 19 games did none among Loup, Castro, May, Familia or Diaz appear. When all five members of the quintet cooled their limbs, the Mets’ record was 4-15.

On May 18, all five pitched (Castro opened). The Mets won.

On May 21, all five pitched (the game went 12 innings). The Mets won.

So why not just make the whole team out of these five? The 73-70 Mets with them involved were statistically better than the 77-85 Mets in toto. It’s understood team wins don’t exactly work that way; a clean seventh inning does not a victory make. Even from a bullpen perspective, more factors than “give the ball to one of these five” enter play. Days of rest inevitably come due. The threat of overuse — a symptom of the prevalence of the dreaded “up-down” in modern baseball parlance — becomes lodged in the organizational brain. Sometimes you’re not going to bring in a specific reliever or five if the game doesn’t fit their skill sets. That night in April when deGrom so thoroughly went the distance over the Nationals that the Nationals tweeted their admiration, you’d have incited a riot had you removed Jacob.

Your own starting pitcher’s excellence, however, isn’t usually the reason you don’t unleash your most trusted relief pitchers in this era. On August 15, the Mets trailed excellent starting pitcher Max Scherzer and the Dodgers, 9-4, in the eighth inning at Citi Field. Geoff Hartlieb was on in relief of, in order, Carlos Carrasco, Jake Reed and Yennsy Diaz. It was conceivable that if Hartlieb or somebody could hold the fort, maybe the Mets could mount a comeback on the Dodger pen, with Max having left after six. It may have been barely conceivable that these Mets could make up five runs on these Dodgers, but the game was not over.

It was getting close to over, however. In the top of the eighth off Hartlieb, there had been an infield single; a flyout; a walk; another flyout, which moved the first runner to third; a wild pitch, which moved the second runner to second; and…

“Now the three-oh — outside for ball four, and that loads ’em up for Will Smith, who has homered in every game of this series,” Howie Rose informed those of us who turned the sound down on ESPN that Sunday night. “Jeremy Hefner is gonna stroll out to the mound. Nobody throwing in the Mets’ bullpen, and I wonder if that’s an indication that if Hartlieb can’t finish…”

Howie checked his scorecard: “The only remaining pitchers out there are Loup, Diaz, Lugo, May, Familia and Castro…”

Only? As I heard that list of the Mets’ six most reliable relievers, any of whom figured as a better bet than Hartlieb at that moment, I also heard Principal Seymour Skinner reliving the trauma he brought home with him from Vietnam for Bart Simpson:

“I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can’t get the spices right.”

Rojas, Hefner and whoever contributed to Met decisionmaking decided that rest for your best relievers outpointed the chance to stifle the Dodgers and give the Mets a chance to win a game they badly needed (they badly needed every game by mid-August). Thus, no fish, no vegetables, no prawns, because, as Howie explained after the briefest pause — when he, too, must’ve thought how strange it sounded to imply the Mets had no more relievers available to them despite having a half-dozen relievers who hadn’t been used that night — who it wouldn’t be ideal to “use in a game that’s right now nine to four, which could get even bigger in disparity, with the Dodgers having the bases loaded here and one out in the eighth inning. So could we be looking at a position player taking the mound for the Mets in the ninth inning? I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Hartlieb stayed on. He gave up a two-run single to Smith and an RBI double to Chris Taylor. In the ninth, trailing by eight runs, Brandon Drury came in, gave up two more runs, reloaded the bases and handed the ball to Kevin Pillar. The second position player got the Mets out of the inning. They’d lose, 14-4, and drop 2½ games behind Atlanta.

The Mets never did get the spices right, but at least the ingredients remained fairly fresh. That Sunday night game was a bracing reminder of how bewildered the Mets could get when they rested their best bets. No doubt it was tempting to ride Loup & Co. for all they were worth, but the Mets exercised restraint. None of their pitchers landed in the Top Ten in appearances in the NL, a far cry from the days of Perpetual Pedro Feliciano, Ubiquitous Aaron Heilman or Tick Tock Turk Wendell, three relievers who their managers didn’t mind going to like clockwork. None of the 2021 stalwarts posted a season that ranks within the Top Forty of most appearances in a season by a Mets reliever.

Although it seemed the Oft-Used Troupe — or OUT — was up and throwing all season long, their deployment was staggered so they didn’t stagger, even as the Mets’ rotation lost deGrom in the second half, Taijuan Walker lost his way in the second half and Marcus Stroman was the only starter who maintained his spot competently and consistently all year long. There were surely downs enmeshed with the ups, but each of those who composed OUT kept getting outs from early April until early October. It didn’t keep the Mets in first place and it didn’t get the Mets back to first place, but their composite presence in those 143 games seemed to make the Mets viable most middle and late innings, especially after Met starters couldn’t last as anticipated, frequently as Met hitters didn’t produce as desired.

A few Loup days and nights stand out in particular.

There was the Sunday afternoon in Pittsburgh in mid-July when Walker and Rojas melted down in tandem in the first inning, as the Pirates took a 6-0 lead after winning from way behind Saturday night. Suddenly it was a bullpen game and nobody penned a more satisfying pair of stanzas than Loup, as the Louisianan lefty retired the Buccos with a double play in the fifth and three consecutive Ks in the sixth, the latter coming with the bases loaded. The 0-6 hole eventually became a 7-6 victory.

There was the Saturday night as July ended when Loup entered with runners on first and third, two out and the Mets trailing the Reds by one. Loup didn’t retire a single batter in traditional fashion. Instead, he picked the runner off first, instigating a 1-3-5-2 out at the plate that cleaned up the mess Seth Lugo left him. It went into the books as one-third of an inning pitched, which one guesses it was, even if Loup’s only pitch of consequence was fired to Pete Alonso.

And there was the weeknight in late August that stands as something of an exception to the rule that Aaron Loup’s assortment of sinkers and cutters was infallible because, well, there’s always an exception to the rule and nobody’s infallible. Walker was having perhaps his best game of the second half, a half when he had few good games. Tai arrived in the seventh up 2-1 over the Giants. He’d allowed only one hit, a home run to Kris Bryant, over the first six, and one walk, to Alex Dickerson with two outs in the fourth, which he made moot by striking out Brandon Crawford immediately after. In the seventh, however, Bryant reached on an error, and Dickerson singled very softly. Crawford was up next. Walker had thrown 74 pitches. It was more Walker’s night than any night all season, and that includes the first half when he earned the right to replace deGrom on the All-Star roster.

Yet Rojas couldn’t resist taking him out and putting Loup in. Loup had reached favorite toy status with his manager. Every manager has one at some point in a season. And who wouldn’t want to play with a toy that works so well and brings so much joy? Aaron was uncommonly well-rested, having last pitched four days earlier. In the seven appearances leading up to this Giants game, he faced 18 batters and gave up only one hit. None of the seven runners he inherited scored. It wasn’t crazy to trust Aaron Loup in this situation more than Taijuan Walker or maybe anybody amid a first-and-second, nobody-out scenario.

Except somehow you knew it was the wrong call. And it was. Crawford, the lefty, lined a double to right, scoring both runners and giving the Giants a lead they would not relinquish. Fallibility, thy name was Loup’s. But not for long. The next night, Loup bailed out Lugo. Three nights later, he shook off a leadoff homer to Juan Soto (no shame in that) and mowed down the rest of the Nats in his inning. And when he pitched again, a couple of days later, he extricated Trevor Williams from a jam by stranding two of the starter’s runners and one of his own.

Just a beer before he goes.

If we received the pleasure of Loup’s company in a postgame media session, we learned one thing that was as indisputable as his sub-1 ERA and his 1.000 winning percentage. The man liked his beer. Specifically, he liked Busch Light. Give him a chance to open, he said in Spring Training, and he’d take it because, “Who wouldn’t want to be the guy to start the game and then get to sit in the clubhouse and drink a few brews on the back end and watch the rest of it?” Loup successfully opened games twice, coming through with the necessary 10 Minute Head start the Mets ordered both times.

Most of his opening was of cans of Busch Light after pitching in a more customary role, evidenced by his usually bringing one with him to the Zoom room and giving it prominent product placement. The lefty developed a taste for it in 2019 when he called San Diego his professional home. It was a clubhouse thing, Loup explained to Justin Toscano in September. Keith Hernandez was known to have a bucket of Michelobs waiting at his feet postgame in his Met heyday, but that was the 1980s. A beer after the game didn’t elicit much notice in those days. These days we see what social media shows us and respond as if we’ve never seen it before. Loup and his Light became a bit of a thing.

So did Aaron’s honesty, which could be as bracing or refreshing as any cold one. Just before the direction Met players’ thumbs took drew everybody’s attention, Loup was asked about the booing that no Met was immune from — including him the night he gave up that momentum-turning double to Crawford. His ERA was still in the low 1s, yet that didn’t cut ice with the crowd after his aberrational bad outing. “It’s tough,” he admitted. “We definitely hear it. You try to drown it out and not pay attention to it the best you can, but we definitely hear it and it makes it tough. We’ve been struggling and not playing well and then when you come home and you kinda get booed off the field, it definitely doesn’t make it any easier.”

As for leadership in the contention-receding period when the Mets could have used a pair of broad shoulders on which everybody else could have figuratively jumped atop, Loup told Devin Gordon in September, “I think that’s probably the one guy we might’ve been missing this year,” somebody with the seriousness and stature to step up and say, “‘OK, that’s enough, it’s time to get down to business.’ Because we all know everybody’s trying, and you always get the rah-rah, ‘next game, you got this’ stuff. But at some point you need, ‘OK, enough. It’s time to go, now.’”

Lefty relievers — unless they’re carrying within the clubhouse the cachet of a McGraw, a Franco or a Wagner — probably don’t have the gravitas to be that guy. Too bad. But in light of being a journeyman on a one-year contract, it was enough that Loup cut his figure as he did, responded as best he could to the challenge at hand when his entrance music blared (“Unapologetically Country As Hell,” which my wife thought sounded a lot like the Li’l Sebastian song from Parks & Rec) and shared his beer and thoughts with us as he saw fit.

In 57 games, or more than one-third, the Mets’ starting pitcher failed to go at least five innings. In 40 others, the starter went no more than five. Loup and Castro each opened two games on purpose, and rainy skies had their impact now and then, but most of the nearly 100 starts that didn’t reach a sixth inning were not by design or circumstance. It was because there wasn’t enough solid starting pitching to get the Mets through what you’d call a traditional rotation. Just get us some outs seemed to be the marching orders to whoever wasn’t deGrom or Stroman.

That’s what you usually tell your relievers. The Oft-Used Troupe listened closely and fulfilled their mission. Not flawlessly, but regularly. Enough to be trusted. Occasionally the trust felt misplaced, because who wants to pat a reliever on the back after a bad inning when all we needed was a good inning, but they kind of earned the trust. We as fans maintain the right to reserve our trust and disburse it in miserly fashion; we’ve earned it and aren’t shy about pointing to the mental scars that prove it. There’s a legitimate push-pull of compassion and derision when it comes to reacting to relief pitching. We are entitled to get annoyed when outs aren’t recorded, even preemptively annoyed that outs might not be recorded. Booing, actually or virtually, is definitely an option.

Yet fair is fair, and I have to tip a cap to one of Loup’s Oft-Used Troupemates, Trevor May — in whom I refrained from investing my trust more than once — for tweeting truth to fandom as the lockout set in and the topic of thumbs-down resurfaced:

“I owe you my very best version every time I take the field. My most prepared, competitive version. All the effort I have in my body. I give that, every damn day.

“I’m not a monkey that dances in proportion to the amount of nachos you buy at a game.”

Asking somebody new to do what Loup did for us, lefty or righty, is an enormous request. You’d settle for a Feliciano type to pick up the slack Aaron left in his free agency wake. We will need the toughness of May, the resilience of Diaz and the electric stuff of Castro to generate continually in 2022. They, like Familia and unlike Loup, rode a rollercoaster in 2021, but they all had spurts when they were only lightly hittable — and none of them fully imploded into a state of uselessness. If bullpen management under new dugout management reflects baseball broadly, we’ll need a cast of dozens filtering in and out of the pen. The Yennsy Diazes, Jake Reeds and Geoff Hartliebs, by their or somebody else’s names, will likely be getting up in a fourth inning near you.

DeGrom, we who are known for our faith have been led to believe, will be healthy and ready to go whenever the gates to Spring Training are unlocked. Scherzer, we’re pretty sure, is going to be Scherzer. That still leaves a day of hoping hard that first-half Walker vanquishes second-half Walker and two other days in the zone of uncertainty (Carrasco, Peterson, Megill, Williams, Lucchesi, whoever) where praying for rain will only get you so far. That’s three days when you’ll be glad to have a bullpen that functions as well as the Oft-Used Troupe of 2021 did. And, if we’re being honest, deGrom’s and Scherzer’s starts may project as brilliant, but they’re probably not gonna go nine.

No, we won’t have Aaron Loup around being as country and effective as hell, given that he converted his 0.95 ERA to two-year deal with the Angels. And we won’t have Jeurys Familia, whose modest renaissance — there were times his sinkers sunk batters like it was still most days in 2015 and 2016 — will win him a free agent shot somewhere. Jeurys already said his goodbyes through Instagram on the final weekend of the season. “[E]very day that I get out of bed, one of the first things [to] cross my mind is what to do to be better and give the best to the best fans in the world of baseball,” Familia posted. “For the fans, despite all the boos, bad words and everything bad that they may think of me or wish me, I put myself in their chair and I understand it perfectly. They have been waiting for a championship for many years.”

It is not to jab at how Jeurys pitched in 2021 to say this might been his most effective delivery in ages. The least we can do is return his pitch in kind and tell Familia, Castro, May, Diaz and MVM avatar Loup, hey, thanks for giving us your best, which is often pretty damn good. And when your best doesn’t always translate as great once the ball leaves your hand…well, we’ll do our best to trust you to try it again.

FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS RICHIE ASHBURN MOST VALUABLE METS
2005: Pedro Martinez (original recording)
2005: Pedro Martinez (deluxe reissue)
2006: Carlos Beltran
2007: David Wright
2008: Johan Santana
2009: Pedro Feliciano
2010: R.A. Dickey
2011: Jose Reyes
2012: R.A. Dickey
2013: Daniel Murphy, Dillon Gee and LaTroy Hawkins
2014: Jacob deGrom
2015: Yoenis Cespedes
2016: Asdrubal Cabrera
2017: Jacob deGrom
2018: Jacob deGrom
2019: Pete Alonso
2020: Michael Conforto and Dom Smith (the RichAshes)

Still to come: The Nikon Camera Player of the Year for 2021.

Thanks to Baseball-Reference and MLB Trade Rumors for their assistance in compiling data for this article.