Gausman excited for 'promising' Blue Jays team

DUNEDIN, Fla. -- At 3 p.m. ET on Dec. 1, Kevin Gausman smiled for the Zoom camera as he was officially introduced by the Blue Jays. Nine hours later, the MLB lockout began.

That was more than 100 days ago, but Gausman hasn’t had anything resembling the typical offseason since signing his five-year, $110 million deal. After throwing in camp for the first time on Monday, the 31-year-old still felt like he was just getting started.

“It’s almost like I forgot that I signed with a new team,” Gausman said. “I thought, ‘Camp is about to start up and I don’t know any of these guys.’ There’s been a lot of familiar faces, seeing them play a lot, but just to put the voice and name to a face is nice. I’m just trying to get to know everybody, what numbers they wear, that type of thing. It’s been great. There’s a lot of excitement in camp right now. This is such a young, promising team.”

In the offseason, Gausman throws at LSU, where he pitched in 2011 and ’12 before being selected No. 4 overall by the Orioles. As the lockout stretched on, though, LSU’s opening day rolled around on Feb. 18, at home against Maine. Gausman is usually off to camp by then, so he had to start working a little earlier in the day as to not interfere with LSU’s schedule. One benefit, though, is that he got to watch his first live game in person in a decade.

This is all still fresh and moving fast for Gausman, but walking into the Blue Jays’ new complex helped to snap him back into the Spring Training mindset. This is a club expecting to compete deep into October, too, after falling just short of the postseason with a 91-71 record in 2021.

“I think Charlie [Montoyo] did a good job on the first day [of camp],” Gausman said. "We expect to win. Anybody here who doesn’t expect that, there’s the door. It was that kind of thing.”

Gausman knows what it looks like when the Blue Jays are expected to make noise. He was on the other side pitching for the Orioles in 2015 and ’16 when Toronto made postseason runs. That gives Gausman 93 1/3 innings against the Blue Jays with a tidy 3.28 ERA, with 12 appearances at Rogers Centre that include his MLB debut.

“From Josh Donaldson to [Edwin] Encarnación and [Jose] Bautista, all of those guys just banged, always,” Gausman said. “It was all about the starting pitching. If your starters can go deep into the game, then there’s less chances for those big boppers to come up in big situations.”

Now that Gausman has his feet set underneath him, Spring Training will look a little different.

His trademark splitter doesn’t typically need much work in camp, but he plans on throwing it more given the shortened ramp-up time. Gausman plans to throw two more live batting practice sessions, in which he’ll tinker with the splitter, and then get into game action.

Gausman used his splitter on 35.3% of pitches in 2021, trailing his fastball, which he used 52.7% of the time. That’s essentially a two-pitch mix, with the rare slider or changeup mixed in, but as we saw with Robbie Ray last season, two very strong pitches can be enough. Opponents hit just .133 against Gausman's splitter last season, with a whiff rate of 45.9%. Watching him throw Monday, it was easy to see why as the pitch left his hand looking like a low fastball, then suddenly buried itself in the dirt behind home plate. Even so, the first bullpen session of camp is always an odd experience.

“It was nerve-wracking, for sure. That net isn’t too high over there, either,” Gausman said playfully, “so I wouldn’t stand back there too close this early in spring. That’s one cool thing about being a pitcher early in spring, though. It seems like everybody is watching you. It’s like that for everybody, and it’s cool because when you’re throwing bullpens in the offseason, it’s usually just you or two other guys watching. This is kind of the first time you get that adrenaline.”

Thankfully for Gausman, he has the next five years to catch up on the time he missed this past offseason, and his presence atop Toronto's rotation alongside José Berríos, Alek Manoah, Hyun Jin Ryu and Yusei Kikuchi will give the club one of MLB’s most talented rotations.