It Might Be Time For Kevin Gausman To Adjust

The two pitch lifestyle is a dangerous one

Over the last couple seasons, Kevin Gausman has been the pitching equivalent of Russian roulette, good for a blowup one out of every six starts. In a broad sense, that hasn’t really mattered: despite 10 starts in 2022 and 2023 where he allowed at least five runs, he was still the best starter in baseball by FanGraphs WAR during that same period, posting a 3.25 ERA and a 30% K rate over 359.2 innings despite allowing a league-high .343 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). For these last two years, he’s maintained this bizarre contrast, at once untouchable and hittable, elite and vulnerable.

This delicate balance looks disrupted to start the 2024 season. After a strong showing on a limited pitch count against Tampa Bay in his first start of the year, he’s delivered two consecutive disastrous outings, allowing six runs to both the Yankees in the Bronx and the Rockies in Toronto. The velocity has bounced around, occasionally reaching as high as 96 mph but sometimes sitting as low as 89 or 90 mph.

He hardly pitched in spring training because of shoulder fatigue, so part of this uneven start can be explained by the fact that he is still ramping up. As Gausman said on Friday, “I wish I was eight starts in right now, but I’m at three or four.” But if the other part of the story is the start of a subtle decline phase — if his plus fastball is drifting closer to average, his devastating splitter transitioning to a merely good pitch — these types of blowups might start to increase in frequency if he declines to make an adjustment.

In 2023, Gausman relied on two pitches more than nearly any starter in the league. (Every pitcher ahead of him with higher two-pitch reliance besides Justin Steele — Hunter Greene, Brady Singer, Spencer Strider, and Graham Ashcraft — has either added a new pitch or significantly increased the use of a third pitch in the 2024 season.) This lack of pitch diversity, in my view, contributed to his propensity to throw in a crummy start every six weeks or so. When the feel for one or both pitches isn’t there on a given day, there is no clear Plan B for mitigating serious damage.

Against the Rockies, it was a slightly different story. It wasn’t just that the fastball feel was off — while the command was somewhat spotty, the velocity was mostly hovering around 94 mph. The bigger issue, as I saw it, is that he didn’t fully believe in the pitch. After allowing three opposite-field hits on four-seamers in the second inning, Gausman abruptly pivoted, throwing ten straight offspeed pitches to retire Michael Toglia and Brenton Doyle and end the rally.

After that ambush, Gausman did not feel comfortable pounding the zone with the four-seamer, and the Rockies knew it. Going forward, they sat on his soft stuff, crushing sliders and splitters to pile on five more runs and drive him out of the game in the fourth inning.

The sequence against Ryan McMahon in the third is a great example of how the sequencing became too predictable as the start went on. Gausman started the at-bat with a fastball well above the zone for ball one. Needing a strike at 1-0, he instead threw the splitter, unsuccesfully bidding for an out-of-zone chase. On 2-0, he threw another splitter; again, a ball below the zone. McMahon wasn’t interested.

After battling back to 3-2, Gausman went to the splitter one last time, this one in a perfect spot for a swing-and-miss. It’s hard to believe McMahon gets to this pitch unless he’s absolutely sure it’s coming:

Gausman himself said it: he was too easy to read after moving away from the fastball as the start progressed. From Keegan Matheson of MLB.com:

Gausman felt he got away from his fastball this time, which you’ll often hear pitchers say, but the specifics matter here. Many of the Rockies’ early hits were off Gausman’s fastball, but when he went away from that pitch, his slider and splitter were giving hitters too much “medium speed” to look at, as Gausman put it. With his trademark split sitting 86 mph and his slider sitting at 83 mph, hitters could downshift mentally and sit on one of those two pitches.

To this point, Gausman’s been able to navigate past the predictable nature of his pitch sequencing by having filthy stuff; his splitter has probably been the best pitch in baseball over the last two seasons, and hitters can’t do much with the fastball when it’s sitting around 95 or 96 mph and located on the edges of the zone. But if the fastball starts to lose a little steam — or if Gausman starts to lose confidence in the pitch, as he did against the Rockies on Friday — he may need to start looking for alternative ways to get ahead in counts or to generate weak contact.

On some level, Gausman must be thinking it too. Against the Rockies, he threw the slider 27% of the time, significantly than his 2023 single-start peak of 19%. The slider is relatively effective as a change-of-pace pitch, but its efficacy starts to wane when it becomes a major part of the attack plan, as he found after hanging a 1-0 slider to Kris Bryant:

If Gausman feels compelled to add to his arsenal, it might be worthwhile to look toward another starter with a fastball/splitter combo: Bryce Miller. Miller threw his four-seamer too frequently in 2023 (58% usage) and paid the price; he ranked near the bottom of the league (just ahead of Gausman) in quality of contact allowed.

Miller’s offseason splitter addition caught tons of headlines, but his less-heralded sinker might be the true difference maker in 2024. In his start on Friday against the Cubs, he got through 6.1 innings with zero earned runs while throwing his sinker 23% of the time. The sinker had a 48% CSW rate, grabbing him nine called strikes at crucial junctures in the game. It allowed Miller to keep hitters off his four-seamer, increasing the effectiveness of his best pitch, and gave him a fastball option at the bottom of the zone.

Again, Gausman’s slow start could just be early season noise, and the stuff could be back in full gear by the end of May. But it’s also important to note that he’s 33 years old and his shoulder hurts. If or when the stuff does start to ever-so-slightly decline, it certainly couldn’t hurt to explore adding a sinker or cutter to get hitters off the four-seamer. The difference between sitting 95 and sitting 94 seems small, but the margins between great and good in baseball are thin, especially when you mostly throw two pitches. As Gausman approaches the wily veteran portion of his career, it may be time to start getting creative.