Gausman altering mechanics midseason

This story was excerpted from Keegan Matheson’s Blue Jays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

SEATTLE -- At times, Kevin Gausman’s season has felt like a milder version of what happened to José Berríos in 2022.

Pick an inning out of a hat and watch it. To the naked eye, Gausman’s game doesn’t look all that different, but he’s been just a bit off, enough for big league hitters to do just a bit more damage.

That’s led to some frustrations for Gausman, who started the season fighting uphill after a shortened Spring Training. He later conceded that it may have been a better idea to begin the year on the IL and build up properly, but Gausman has spent much of this season chasing something that only feels a few inches away.

Friday in Seattle, it felt like he found it.

“I definitely had a bit of a different delivery today, and that was by design,” Gausman said. “It’s something we’re trying to get back to what I was doing in 2021. I think it will allow me to be around the zone a little bit more.”

Tinkering is one thing, but visibly altering mechanics is something else entirely. This really can’t be overstated. Big changes are what Spring Training is for, but Gausman toyed with this change in a bullpen session two days prior to his start in Seattle, and he liked it. When he warmed up before the game, he liked it even more.

There’s still a real edge of old school to Gausman, though. After most starts, he’ll tell you that he wasn’t sure if he was throwing 91 mph or 97. He needed to see it work in a game.

“I always say: hitters are going to let you know,” Gausman said. “Punching out the first guy of the game definitely gave me confidence.”

The simple version is that this starts with Gausman’s setup. Gausman tried to be more “hunched over” on the mound, he said, and by hunching his back and dropping his posture a bit, this allowed him to lower his arm angle. One immediate result was better fastball control, and that pitch was clocked at 1.4 mph harder than his 2024 average, missing plenty of bats.

It’s always going to be about Gausman’s splitter, though, and lately he’s felt like that pitch is “moving a bit too much.” That’s not a problem most pitchers on the planet can even imagine, but the splitter is a different animal.

“I think my mechanics are the reason for that,” Gausman said. “I was getting way too much horizontal movement on my splitter and not enough vertical movement. I haven’t looked at the metrics, but I could tell that it was carrying the zone. To me, that shows the vertical was there on my splitter. Guys are going to swing more at it when it looks like it’s going to be in the zone longer.”

That one’s the key. Any time Gausman has a poor start, one of the first sentences out of his mouth post-game is that his splitter “wasn’t carrying the zone.” It needs to deceive hitters before plummeting, which it hasn’t done enough lately. This feels like a solution.

Friday’s start (two runs on six hits and two walks over six innings, with 10 strikeouts) lowered Gausman’s ERA to 4.64, and he should be able to drag that down closer to 4.00 by season’s end if he stays on this path. Given where the Blue Jays (40-49 and likely Trade Deadline sellers) are, that may not change much in 2024.

This organization still wants to compete in 2025, though, with its likeliest deadline strategy still being a partial sell-off to pivot toward another run with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette. That could include moving Yusei Kikuchi, whose deal runs out at the end of this season, but Gausman is still positioned as next year’s ace with Chris Bassitt and José Berríos in that same rotation. They’ll need far more depth, but the top end looks just fine.

Even with this season’s challenges included, Gausman’s five-year, $110 million contract is one of the best “big” deals this organization has handed out in its history. He owns a 3.55 ERA over the three seasons, with a third-place American League Cy Young Award finish in 2023. The year prior, Gausman got only one vote for the Cy and finished ninth, but he deserved more.

These tweaks seem to have pointed Gausman back in the right direction, and when he’s right, he’s still the ace in town.