Without looking at the box score, if someone saw Jacob deGrom's stats from Monday night's game, they'd say he had a stellar game.
In 7.0 innings, deGrom threw 112 pitches while allowing four hits, two walks, just two runs and a whopping 14 strikeouts — a mark that tied his career-high.
But throw in the final box score, and you'd see that the Mets lost Monday's game against the Rays 2-1, and that deGrom was given the loss.
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When asked if he was thinking about his Cy Young chances when he gave up those two runs, deGrom said he was more concerned with the game itself than anything else.
"What crossed my mind was 'hey, get back up there and give our guys a chance,' deGrom said. "I try to picture everything as a 0-0 game and when something like that happens. ... you still have to go out there and pitch."
Giving up just two runs in a game for any pitcher would be a decent showing, but the Mets were only able to muster up two hits a piece by Jeff McNeil and Wilson Ramos, and got base runners across the plate just once, leaving deGrom's runs as the biggest mistakes in the end.
"It's frustrating to make those mistakes and give up those runs, especially when I needed to put up zeros and I wasn't able to do that," deGrom said.
As deGrom fights to win his third straight NL Cy Young award, both he and Mets fans know that wins and losses don't matter anymore to voters. We've seen this in the last two seasons with deGrom winning back-to-back Cy Young's despite going 10-9 and 11-8 in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Now with the season shortened due to COVID-19, records will be even less looked at to determine this year's winner.
But at the end of the day, like any player, deGrom would tell you that he'd rather compete for a championship than win another individual award. But at the moment —with the Mets 3.5 GB of the second wild card spot and just six games left on their schedule — it doesn't look like that's going to happen this year.