What is MLB Network’s Shredder and why does it hate Jacob deGrom?

Recently, baseball fans are engrossed in MLB Network Top 10 Right Now position rankings ahead of the start of the 2026 season as they make their way onto social media feeds and repeated by every baseball reporting outlet.

"The Shredder," a statistical model that decides these lists often arbitrary and sometimes bizarre that, for whatever reason, don't seem to favor Jacob deGrom after his incredible bounce back season.

deGrom being omitted from the model's top ten starting pitchers in baseball was enough for us to take a deeper dive into what Shredder is, and why it hates the Jacob deGrom so much.

MLB Network's Shedder ranking system is a complex, data-driven modality

MLB Network's "The Shredder" rankings are a data-driven system that determines the top 10 players at each position "Right Now." Using a formula that evaluates a combination of past performance, advanced metrics and traditional stats, it spits out its sometimes confusing lists.

What is most notable about The Shredder is that it also includes a rather nebulous "research team analysis" component of subjective human opinion, along with its number crunching and advanced metric interpretations.

Jacob deGrom is being overlooked and undersold by The Shredder

The most recent top ten list of the league's best starting pitchers excludes deGrom, a two-time Cy Young Award winner who was an All-Star and winner of the esteemed 2025 AL Comeback Player of the Year Award.

In a 30 start season, deGrom had a 2.97 2.97 ERA and a 0.92 WHIP, which was good for second-best in baseball behind only AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal.

There are a handful of pitchers that we'll readily admit are better than deGrom right now in Skubal, Pirates phenom Paul Skenes and possibly Garrett Crochet. Still, you can make the argument that deGrom is a better pitcher than everyone else on the list, which includes: Zack Wheeler, Christopher Sanchez, Chris Sale, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Hunter Brown, Max Fried and Hunter Greene.

These are all outstanding hurlers, but deGrom's numbers are as good or better than most of them. And this isn't a BBWAA or "East Coast bias" issue either, as it is apparently all numbers-driven with the exception of the ambiguous "research team analysis."

deGrom is also well-regarded by the New York media for his stellar back-to-back Cy Young seasons with the Mets in 2018 and 2019.

It should also be noted that The Shredder also ranked Boston's up-and-comer Roman Anthony the second-best left fielder despite having played only 71 MLB games. It makes you wonder how much it weighs potential as opposed to past performance. To reiterate, The Shredder's top ten lists are supposed to be based on the player right now, not a year or five years from now.

The Shredder also ranked deGrom as the 50th best player in MLB

How can the man with the second-best WHIP in the entire league barely crack The Shredder's top 50 players right now on the top 100 list at 50? What gives?

WHIP (the total number of walks and hits given up divided by total innings pitched) is widely viewed by most statisticians and baseball experts as the most important and accurate metric available to measure a pitcher's excellence and overall control of the game while on the mound.

Despite the expertise at the MLB Network and the wealth of baseball minds at its disposal, the Shredder's lists sometimes come out looking awfully wonky and lacking in veracity.