How Kevin Gausman's game is made for the new baseballs

One of the biggest stories of the early MLB season is an offensive decline that’s having a noticeable effect on the style of play around the league.

The average ERA has fallen from 4.27 to 3.75 and the average OPS has dropped from .726 to .676 in 2022. While some of that can be attributed to colder temperatures or hitters needing time to find their timing, players from Blue Jays starter Alek Manoah to Brewers outfielder Andrew McCutchen have spoken out about the balls being a significant issue.

From an MLB-wide perspective, an inconsistency in equipment significant enough to meaningfully alter the product on the field is nothing but a negative. For a few select players, though, it represents an opportunity.

Enter Kevin Gausman.

Although all pitchers benefit from a ball that doesn’t seem to travel like it did in 2021, the Toronto Blue Jays’ top free agent prize has a set of characteristics that make him especially well-equipped to thrive in this offensive environment — something he’s clearly already doing.

What makes the right-hander particularly well-suited to this moment is the way that a slightly deadened baseball papers over his biggest, and arguably only, weakness. 

Taking a look at Gausman’s Statcast MLB percentile rankings over the last two seasons, it’s clear that contact-quality-against is by far his biggest issue:

The right-hander is outstanding at getting players to chase, and ultimately whiff. He’s also got excellent control. His current K/BB ratio of 46-to-1 is astonishing, and impossible to fluke into no matter how small a sample you’re talking about. Gausman’s superhuman 2022 FIP of 0.73 isn’t going to stick, but his ability to do what he’s done over six starts is nothing short of remarkable.

Where the 31-year-old can run into trouble is when hitters put the ball in play (which, to be fair, happens less for him than most pitchers). For all of his talents, Gausman does not suppress hard contact well. His fastball is more good than elite, and it’s the only pitch he throws in the strike zone consistently. 

That can mean he’s challenging hitters with it in the heart of the zone more than many pitchers of his calibre. As a result, his fastball heatmap since the beginning of 2021 looks like this:

It’s not a dissimilar approach to former Toronto starter Robbie Ray’s last season. Ray emphasized pounding the strike zone in 2021, and won the Cy Young despite having exit velocity against in the 15th percentile. Gausman lives with some hard contact because pounding the zone with heaters also lets him get ahead of hitters — making them far more likely to chase his splitter, and far less likely to walk.

In 2021 that tradeoff was more than worth it. In 2022 he’s barely had to make it at all. Hard contact has been significantly less damaging this season than in recent years, which has taken the sting out of Gausman’s primary weakness. 

This year, league-average Expected Slugging (.433) is falling 63 points of actual slugging (.370), and Gausman has seen a similar effect where allowing almost the exact same contact as he did in 2021 is working betting for him:

For some more visceral examples of this effect, let’s look at the farthest-hit balls against Gausman this season. 

Number one is off the bat of Boston's Alex Verdugo, and it travels 395 feet:

That looks harmless enough, but it’s the sort of ball that could’ve been a problem last season. Verdugo’s hit there was 103.4 mph at a launch angle of 29 degrees.

Here’s a ball hit slightly less hard (102.1 mph) at 29 degrees last year at Rogers Centre:

It’s not a perfect analogue as it’s going to right-centre instead of left, but it’s similarly angled away from straight-away centre. Even with less juice off the bat it goes four feet further, which makes all the difference in this case.

We get a more dramatic example on the second-furthest hit against Gausman in 2022 (379 feet):

This hit requires a four-man outfield — and a quality run from George Springer — to generate an out, but last year it’s probably not possible. 

Houston's Kyle Tucker hit that ball 109.0 mph with a 20 degree launch angle. Here’s a ball hit to centre at 108.1 mph with a 23 degree launch angle in 2021:

Statcast projected that ball to land 409 feet from home plate if the wall hadn’t gotten in the way. A couple extra degrees of lift helps, but it’s not hard to imagine a hit like this dying in Jays outfielder George Springer’s glove this season. 

When the Blue Jays signed Gausman they had every reason to expect he’d be a front-of-the-rotation starter based on his performance in 2020 and 2021. What they couldn’t predict was a new offensive environment that would fit his skill set like a glove. Now the right-hander isn’t just trying to give the team an admirable backfill on a Cy Young winner, he’s mounting an early case for the award himself.