Untimely Jacob deGrom injury concerns magnify Rangers' possible buyers' remorse

Jacob deGrom has far and away obliterated his previous season marks of innings pitched in 2025 and up until Wednesday has avoided missing a start due to some sort of injury or fatigue concerns.

On Tuesday, Rangers' President of Baseball Operations Chris Young announced that the 37-year-old right-hander will skip his Wednesday start in Kansas City after experiencing shoulder fatigue.

He now joins the rest of the Rangers' 2025 rotation that has either missed a start or missed time due to injuries throughout the year. While that is normal for most pitchers throughout a season, it is more of a concern for deGrom, who's injury history always has the team holding their breathe and praying for good news.

Most innings pitched since 2019 was bound to fatigue deGrom

deGrom is in the midst of a career reniassance season. One where he's thrown 140 1/3 innings for Texas, the most since his 2019 NL Cy Young season with the New York Mets. In that time he's 10-5 with a 2.76 ERA, 140 strikeouts and 0.93 WHIP in 24 starts.

While deGrom insisted he could pitch, it seems Texas values the longer-term commitment to deGrom over risking a potential bigger absence.

Texas did say they were able to get him checked out by team doctors and the results came back positive and a skip in the rotation should be enough. But we've been here before, sometimes issues are played off to be smaller than they actually are then all of a sudden he's out for a year.

"Obviously it's tough timing, but honestly, Jacob's been tremendous for us all season long, and the last thing we as an organization are going to do is put him in harm's way after everything he's done this year,” Young told reporters. “The hope is to skip a start and then finish strong. Everything checked out great, just normal fatigue. This workload is the most he's had in a long time. Jacob wanted to keep going. We took it out of his hands.”

Does deGrom's injury trigger buyers' remorse for Rangers?

Since signing with the Rangers prior to the 2023 regular season, deGrom has appeared in 33 games for Texas. He got six starts into his first year with the team before geting shut down due to another UCL tear and eventual Tommy John Surgery.

He recovered and then made three starts late last season as he began his comeback to the mound. This season, while it has been bumpy, is the best deGrom has looked since that 2019 season in Queens.

The baseball world knew how valuable deGrom is when healthy. A lot of people would even admit deGrom is perhaps the best pitcher in the game when he is on the mound and his resume would make a great case for it. However, those same people were also skeptical about Texas giving him $175 million given that injury history.

Somehow, Texas was able to win their first World Series without deGrom, thanks in large part to Nathan Eovaldi and Jordan Montgomery, which saved Chris Young's job at the time. In 2025, it was starting to look like a heck of a good signing when he returned healthy to lead the best rotation in MLB.

The Rangers now do find themselves back in that 2023 position where the fear looms over as he is faced with finding out how concerning the injury actually is. Obviously, the hope is he'll be back for his next start but we never can know for sure with deGrom until he's standing out on that mound.