CHRIS PEDOTA, NORTHJERSEY.COM-USA TODAY NETWORK

The upcoming regular season is going to take on a different look than what we’re used to, but if we’re looking for something familiar within the weirdness, all we have to do is look at FanGraphs’ pitcher projections.

That’s where we find New York Mets ace and two-time reigning National League Cy Young award winner, Jacob deGrom, up at the top. While Gerrit Cole is projected to lead baseball in both fWAR (2.2) and ERA (3.29), deGrom is right behind him (2.1 and 3.32). This would just be a continuation of what he’s done the past two seasons — his 1.70 ERA and 9.0 fWAR were the best in baseball by a wide margin in 2018, while his 2.43 ERA and 7.0 fWAR in 2019 both ranked as the league’s second-best marks for starting pitchers.

Although the Mets just started their summer camp workouts to prepare for a scheduled Opening Day at Citi Field on July 24th agains the Atlanta Braves, it’s hard to not get excited about the mere sight of baseball activity. During a year that’s been anything but normal, seeing some guys run and throw a ball around a diamond has me feeling centered again, even if it’s for a split second.

DeGrom smiling and chatting while he got his arm loose was basically how all of us were feeling while watching him do it:

Even more encouraging — although it’s not surprising — is what manager Luis Rojas said after the workout about his ace:

I mean, what else is he going to say, right? While Rojas talking up his ace is a given at any point in time, virtually none of us were assuming it was a white lie. DeGrom is likely in midseason form because that’s exactly how he’s performed for the majority of the past two seasons.

One of many similarities deGrom has produced during this period of domination is that he’s finished both of his award-winning campaigns incredibly strong. Has it actually been much stronger than the rest of the year, though? Since New York is scheduled to start its 2020 journey on July 24th, I went back to 2018 and 2019 and split those seasons up by looking at the right-hander’s performance leading up to that date and then after that date.

Here’s what 2018 looks like:

And here’s a peek at 2019:

The difference in ERA between these two periods last year is significant, but that had a lot to do with a March/April where deGrom struggled to a 4.85 ERA. Regardless of that one huge difference, the ace clearly took his game to another level for the last bit of his seasons in each category singled out above.

Could it just be because he got into a groove after tossing 100-plus innings and rode that wave to the end two consecutive years? Well, sure — that’s quite possibly one of the main reasons. For someone like deGrom, though, who is a fierce competitor and wants to embarrass the opposition (as David Wright said on an episode of the Cookie Club a while back), there’s that hunger to not just get to the finish line, but to sprint through it.

We’ve heard for our entire lives that baseball is a marathon and every game counts. Every game still counts, but now it’s a sprint, and based off what we’ve seen recently, a sprint down the homestretch of a race is deGrom’s specialty.

Anything can happen in a 60-game season. Even though the Mets’ rotation has some question marks without Noah Syndergaard and inserting Michael Wacha with Rick Porcello on the back end, it’s imperative that someone sets the tone. The best person to do that is deGrom, who will be the dude toeing the slab against the Braves at Citi Field in just under three weeks.

There’s no better pitcher for the job. It would’ve been awesome for us to have a normal, 162-game regular season like we’re used to, and while it’s still up in the air as to how much baseball we’ll actually get to watch, any baseball is better than none. Heading into such an unprecedented situation, it’s nice knowing the Mets have an ace who is well equipped when it comes to maximizing performance over such a crucial period of time.