Jacob deGrom is one of the more intriguing stories in Major League Baseball.  A shortstop in college at Stetson University, deGrom did not pick up pitching until his junior year when scouts saw plenty of promise from the lengthy infielder.

Possibly the first scout to see deGrom’s potential was Steve Barningham, the Southeast regional scouting supervisor for the New York Mets. As the story goes, Stetson was playing an early season game against Georgia, there weren’t many spectators in the stands and it was freezing cold outside. DeGrom pitched the last inning and Barningham described his performance as “electric.”

“The ball jumped out of his hand, had natural life, stayed down in the zone,” Barningham told Fred Kerber of the New York Post back in 2014. "[He] threw a really tight ball, and this was a guy with really no slider at this point. So he’d throw more of a cutter, but you could tell there was something there. And he just pounded the bottom of the strike zone.”

Well, now he has a slider in his repertoire and he has taken electric to another level.

He was drafted in the ninth round in the 2010 draft, got Tommy John surgery in October of that year and made his MLB debut with the Mets in 2014. His rookie season was certainly impressive – he won the National League Rookie of the Year due in large part to his 2.69 ERA and 9.2 K/9 – but in 2015, he has somehow found a way to not only sustain, but improve those gaudy numbers.

The country got to see deGrom at his best in last month’s MLB All-Star Game, when he needed only 10 pitches to strike out each of the three batters he faced. In a game featuring the best players in the world, deGrom was arguably the most impressive. 

After that superb outing, two of the three All-Stars he struck out were especially complimentary of the 27-year-old right-hander.

"It was good morning, good afternoon, ball outside, goodnight," Cleveland Indians second baseman Jason Kipnis said to reporters about his at-bat, which was the only one to last more than three pitches against deGrom. "He's a power pitcher, a strong pitcher and a [darn] good one, and I got to see it tonight."

Oakland A's catcher Stephen Vogt said, via Joe Lemire of USA Today, that deGrom was “some kind of good.”

But while that is all fine and good, it was just one inning of work. The two aforementioned hitters likely did not have a large enough sample size against deGrom to accurately judge just how dominant he can be.

However, one of the game’s premier sluggers recently gave deGrom the highest possible praise.

“DeGrom is the best pitcher in the game, hands down,” Colorado Rockies outfielder Carlos Gonzalez said via Adam Rubin of ESPN.com after deGrom allowed only two hits and no runs in seven innings on Wednesday. "I've faced a lot of good pitchers, but his stuff is the best I've seen."

“His fastball jumps. He throws 98. His changeup is also good. His slider has a lot of angle to it. And he has a good curveball. When you get to two strikes with a guy like him, you don’t even know what to look for.”

CarGo is correct in that deGrom has the ability to attack hitters in a variety of ways. He can go after them hard with a four-seamer or a sinker, or he can stay soft with his changeup, slider or curveball, all of which are above-average offerings, according to Brooks Baseball.

What makes deGrom so special is that not only does he have filthy stuff, but he also has the ability to translate that stuff into outs. The traditional stats say that deGrom is having a fantastic season; he is 11-6 with a miniscule 2.03 ERA. Also, he has surrendered only 6.3 hits per nine innings pitched, trailing only Zack Greinke for the lowest such total in all of baseball.

The advanced sabermetrics are favorable as well. DeGrom currently ranks second in all of baseball in fielding independent pitching (FIP) and eighth in pitcher wins above replacement (WAR), per FanGraphs. Using Baseball-Reference’s adjusted ERA+, he is the third-best pitcher in all of baseball.

So the players, old time baseball people and cutting edge nerds all agree that deGrom is one of baseball’s best pitchers. He was pretty much an unknown quantity throughout his collegiate and minor league careers, but now he is the opposite.

Everyone knows that he is a legit ace and one of the league’s brightest pitching stars. His New York club is now five games ahead of the Washington Nationals for the National League East division lead, so we might soon be seeing deGrom back on the big stage.

And we know that is when he performs at his best. Just ask Kipnis, Vogt, Jose Iglesias or anyone who watched the All-Star Game.

All stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference unless otherwise noted.