Expectations were once again high for Kevin Gausman coming into this season so it’s been frustrating to see what essentially amounts to stagnation for the 25-year old righty. Of course, in addition to that relatively young age, it’s also worth remembering that he has just 249 career innings, about a season and a half’s worth. What’s going on that has kept Gausman from taking that big jump forward? The primary issue is a reverse platoon split that has seen righties drill him to the tune of an .842 OPS the last two seasons.
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The home run is his biggest issue against righties. He has allowed homers at a 5% clip against righties since the start of 2015, second to only Anibal Sanchez (6%) for the league’s worst mark. If you remove home runs, Gausman drops to a .591 OPS against righties which is still worse than average (.575, min. 380 batters faced), but nowhere near worst in the league level. What leaves him so homer-prone against same-handed opposition? Honestly, it’s his entire arsenal, but as a 69-70% fastball pitcher it always comes down to the heater.
In 2014, he had a career-best .662 OPS against right-handers, allowing just 3 HRs in 189 PA. The fastball was the driving force, allowing a .663 OPS in 151 of those plate appearances. More importantly, they hit just one homer off the heat. He had just a 6% HR/FB rate that season and while he almost certainly had some influence on that, there was also some good fortune. A rate like that is best-in-the-league kind of stuff. Since the start of 2014, just two qualified starters have a 6% HR/FB – Jake Arrieta and Adam Wainwright – and they are pacing the league (min. 300 IP). Gausman’s 11% in that timeframe sits 67th out of the 109 qualified pitchers.
If the 6% in 2014 had some good luck behind it, perhaps the 14% he’s had since then (20th-highest out of 107 SPs w/at least 180 IP) has some bad luck to it? He does pitch in a homer-happy ballpark, but he’s actually allowed 17 homers on the road since the start of 2015, compared to 12 at home in nearly identical innings totals. Twelve of the 22 total homers to righties since 2015 have come off the fastball. There are distinct differences in the fastball usage between 2014 and 2015-16. In ’14, he works down and in regularly with 71% of his heaters in the lower half and 60% on the inner half of the plate. In ’15-16, those figures are at 63% and 56%, respectively.
I think it is a matter of predictability. It doesn’t matter if you can pump fastballs in the mid-90s, if a major leaguer knows it’s coming, they’ll hammer it. Since the start of ’15, when a righty is ahead, he gets a fastball 71% of the time from Gausman and 40% of those are down the middle so it’s no wonder that they have a .406/.506/.828 line against it – the worst in baseball (min. 70 PA which yielded 68 pitchers). In 2014, they had a .324/.395/.405 line in 43 PA. He could go to another pitch more often, but that would likely only mask the issue. The simple fact is that he needs to command his fastball more, even if it means toning down the velocity a tick.
His fastball has incredible armside run which dominates lefties as it runs away from them. I wonder if there is some hesitation to let it get that same movement against righties for some reason. I say “some reason” because I can’t even foster a guess to what he’d be worried about. When he busts the fastball in out of the zone against righties, he’s got a .564 OPS over the last two years. In fact, all of his pitches have generally worked out of the zone on the inner half of the plate against righties in that timeframe. His .585 OPS is better than the .610 league average in that span (min. 100 PA). Just leaving the zone isn’t the answer, though. While he is better when he does that, it’s more in comparison to how horrible he is in the zone as opposed to being a stud out of it.
The answer might be a cutter against righties. I know, I know…Baltimore and the cutter don’t mix. But if we’re to believe the pitch data, Tillman doubled his cutter usage this year and it’s been a key factor in his success. One concern about the cutter is that it can morph with a slider and render both ineffective, or at least less effective. Gausman’s slider sucks, though, especially against righties. They have a 1.057 OPS off of it in his career, including an eye-popping 1.253 OPS this year with approximately 4,028 home runs. OK, both of those numbers are misleading.
Well, one of them is completely made up. The OPS is slightly misleading because it has come in just 75 PA across his four seasons and as such, the ugly 7% home run comes out to just five homers. But the point still stands that the slider sucks. If it’s in the zone, it’s game over (1.265 OPS) so maybe he could get more use out of it if he left the zone more (.330 OPS, but just 19 PA). I still think a cutter would be better, though. It would allow him to use that natural velocity and ideally, it would give him something he could use in the zone as a counter to the fastball that runs in on the hands.
The splitter has also been a nightmare against righties lately. Look at the OPS totals since 2013: .522, .468, 1.313, and 1.217. Similar to slider, it’s a small sample. All four seasons total just 88 PA, but it’s been so bad since the start of ’15 that I can’t just wipe it away with small sample size caveats. Check out the trend when it’s in the zone: .500, .818, 1.769, and 2.167. Again, the samples are even smaller, but the magnitude of awfulness can’t be ignored.
The overarching trend is that Gausman has poor command. He is danger any time he throws a pitch in the zone against righties. This is where the differences between command and control start to show. He has just a 7% career walk rate which is pretty good (just 6% over the last two years), so that tells us he can throw strikes. But the quality of those strikes is quite low. The ability to command your stuff in the zone – throw good strikes – is what separate studs from backend starters, especially with the fastball. This reminds me a lot of Michael Pineda.
The 27-year old righty has had a similar lack of consistency tied to his inability to throw quality strikes. He doesn’t have the same platoon problems, but instead he’s an equal opportunity homer run allower. He has a .513 OPS in 348 PA on pitches out of the zone since the start of 2015, compared to a .906 on pitches in the zone over 688 PA. For reference, the league averages .779 OPS in the zone and .560 out of it.
So where do we go from here? I’ll reiterate that despite the panic and discontent around Gausman’s inconsistency, it’s still remarkably early in his career. In other words, perhaps part of this is just outsized expectations placed on him. Despite everything I’ve laid out, we’re still talking about a guy with a 105 ERA+ since the start of 2014 in 58 appearances, 50 of them starts. He needs to hone his command of everything against righties and might even consider adding a cutter in lieu of the slider.
He isn’t good enough within the zone to be the kind of frontline arm the Orioles need to make a serious run this year. We see it in spurts – such as his last start – but most guys in a major league rotation can have a great start or three. I’d like to see Gausman work in and off the plate with the fastball and splitter to righties and bury the slider down and out of the zone (and/or add a cutter in the upper-80s, low-90s that can play in-zone).
He gets the lefty-heavy Mariners in his next start which sets up well for him. Nelson Cruz, Chris Iannetta, and Franklin Gutierrez (recently installed with the optioning of Nori Aoki) are the only righty regulars for the M’s and they could start Steve Clevenger at catcher over Iannetta. It’ll be an isolated couple of at-bats, but I’ll be focused on how Gausman attacks Cruz. He gets the Dodgers after that and they too have a lot of lefties (Corey Seager, Adrian Gonzalez, Chase Utley, Joc Pederson, and Yasmani Grandal [switch-hitter]) so this is a chance for Gausman to get on a roll after the 7.2 scoreless innings vs. Tampa Bay over the weekend.
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