Baltimore Orioles: Kevin Gausman’s peak years coming?
By Rick Soisson
The best may still be yet to come for Baltimore Orioles starter Kevin Gausman.
Baltimore Orioles starter Kevin Gausman was drafted fourth overall in 2012 by the Orioles, receiving a $4.3 million signing bonus. For most of his career, he has been a starting pitcher, with a few relief appearances in his brief stints with the O’s in ’13 and ’15. He still has a mid-90s fastball with a tail, and has hit 100 mph occasionally. He is on the cusp of his age-27 season. His slider has 12-6 movement. He gets ground balls.
The age that rock stars die and MLB players need to produce is 27, so it’s worth asking what Orioles fans can expect from Gausman for the next five years. That timeframe is reasonable for the player to stay in orange and black if he begins to post better results than his lifetime 34-43 won-loss record suggests.
Some feel his problems are simply his home division, the A.L. East, and Camden Yards. This may be true relative to the first item, the mashers he has to frequently face, but his home park doesn’t seem a particularly good excuse. Some of his other career numbers are a little disconcerting for a guy who’s been analyzed as producing more ground balls than other right-handed pitchers. Brooks Baseball looks at all pitches on this sort of thing. In Gausman’s case, that career total is 11,113 pitches. If he gets more ground balls than his peers, why does he have a 1.344 WHIP and a 4.18 ERA after throwing all those baseballs?
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It may well be Gausman simply needs to mix in more sliders and work on perfecting his change-up, which Brooks notes he almost never throws and no one ever swings at. Could he just be throwing too many fastballs that “miss” in hitting zones for those bombers the Orioles face? His home runs surrendered, while not wildly high, have been going almost straight up his whole career. (He finally posted two “full-season” IP figures in ’16 and ’17, starting 30 and 34 games, the latter figure a league-leading number.) One good sign here is his ’16 HR per game figure was 0.93, but in ’17 it dropped to 0.85. With luck and thought, perhaps the ’16 figure will turn out to be a peak he climbs down from.
Gausman’s over-reliance on his fastball is also suggested by a comparison to Phillies pitcher Aaron Nola, who is nearing his 25th birthday. Both are LSU grads, and both have been pitching for last place teams in hitters’ parks. A significant difference between them, however, is in fastball velocity, and that difference is fairly stark. If you tend to think of Nolan Ryan when watching Gausman, Nola will remind you of Greg Maddux. There are at least five or six mph between their peak velocities, so Nola relies on location and a pretty good changeup. His lifetime numbers are 24-22, 3.94 ERA, 1.236 WHIP. His HR per game figures were 0.50 in ’16 and 0.66 in ’17.
Kevin Gausman seemingly has the tools to be a 15-20 game winner every year, and he should probably move towards that this summer. However, he might need to think through his approach to hitters and to get some offensive help from his fellow Baltimore Orioles.