Cody Bradford is shut down for a few days with elbow soreness. The MRI revealed no structural damage.

— Jared Sandler (@JaredSandler) March 12, 2025

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"I look at the best -- '18," deGrom said of his first Cy Young season. "There were times where I hit 100 or close to it, but I think I sat around 96."

He did. Ninety-six mph on the dot for his high-spin four-seam fastball. It jumped to 96.9 in 2019, 98.6 in 2020 and 99.2 in 2021. In the 11 games deGrom pitched toward the end of 2022, it was still 98.9 -- and then 98.7 before he blew out again.

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Part of that showed in deGrom's September cameo last year. His fastball averaged 97.3 mph, and he still managed to look like himself: 1.69 ERA, 14 strikeouts against one walk with one home run allowed in 10 innings. Rather than rush back, deGrom put himself in a position to tackle the offseason. Those innings were enough to psychologically move past the rehabilitative stage and reenter achievement mode. He trained with the same intensity he did in past seasons. The stuff would still be there. While peers were spending the winter immersed in pitch design, deGrom was seeking the version of himself that could marry his inherent deGromness with the sturdiness he embodied the first six years of his career.

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That approach carried into deGrom's spring debut Saturday against the Kansas City Royals. He averaged 97 mph on his fastball, topping out at 98. His slider remained near its previous levels at 90. He flipped in a pair of curveballs for strikes, too, just as a reminder that he's liable to buckle your knees at any given moment. On 31 pitches, deGrom threw 21 strikes, didn't allow a baserunner and punched out three, including reigning MVP runner-up Bobby Witt Jr. on a vicious 91.5-mph slider.

On his last batter of the day, deGrom started with a slider well off the plate inducing a swing-and-miss from Tyler Gentry, then followed with a low-and-not-quite-as-outside slider Gentry spit on. When a curveball that was well off the plate was called a strike, deGrom saw an opportunity. This is the art of pitching -- of weighing the count, what a hitter has seen, how to take advantage of an umpire's zone. He dotted a 97.3-mph fastball on the exact horizontal plane as the curveball and elevated it to the top of the strike zone, a nasty bit of sorcery that only a handful of pitchers on the planet can execute at deGrom's level. Gentry stared at it, plate umpire Pete Talkington punched him out and deGrom strode off the mound, beta test complete.

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