Kevin Gausman’s Secret Weapon

Keegan Matheson has a beard. Let’s start there. Matheson is MLB.com’s Blue Jays beat writer and he has a beard. It’s a big, glorious, pointy beard, and it’s attached to his face and everything.

Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman has a beard too. It’s not glorious like Matheson’s. The right-hander usually opts for a few days’ growth, but in recent weeks, he’s been going a step further. It’s still patchy in the cheeks. Closeups show you individual hairs splayed in whichever direction their whimsy takes them. All the same, more often than not, Gausman has been moving beyond stubble status and into the beginnings of beard territory. Gausman has also been pitching quite well lately, running a 2.25 ERA and 3.00 FIP over his past 10 starts.

Last Thursday, Matheson watched Gausman mow down the Astros, pitching a shutout with nine strikeouts, two walks, and one hit, and made the connection. “The nerds won’t tell you this because their charts won’t show it,” he posted on Bluesky, “but Kevin Gausman’s recent hot streak has a direct correlation to him embracing a beard. Something to monitor.”

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a nerd. And I take offense. In the pantheon of advice, “Don’t challenge the nerds to do something nerdy” is right up there with “Correlation does not imply causation” and “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” Challenge accepted.

Gausman has made 29 starts this season. For each one of those starts, I downloaded high-resolution images from our photo service, zoomed way in on his face, and graded the amount of facial hair using our latest sabermetric innovation: the Stubble Score (trademark pending). Then I took those grades and checked for a correlation with Gausman’s performance:

Let’s start by breaking down the scale here. It goes from one to five. A one is completely clean shaven; a five is the beard Gausman sported last week. (Matheson’s beard would be a 14.) Here’s an example of each integer on the scale so you know what we’re talking about:

Photo credits left to right: Vincent Carchietta, John E. Sokolowski, Kevin Sousa, Nick Turchiaro, John E. Sokolowski. Imagn Images.

As you can see from the distribution below, Gausman spends most of his time right in the middle, in the range that I would classify as serious stubble. It’s not quite a beard, but it’s more than a day or two of growth. He’s only gone fully clean shaven one time all season:

I mention that one clean-shaven game in particular because, uh, it didn’t go well. It was on April 27 and Gausman got absolutely lit up, allowing six earned runs to the Yankees and lasting just 2 2/3 innings. His game score of 23 was his second lowest of the entire season. Oh, I should also mention that one time he sported a glove beard. It was a surprisingly great look:

Anyhow, even if you toss out that one clean-shaven game as an outlier, Gausman has pitched better when he’s been more heavily bearded. The correlation coefficient between his Stubble Score and game score is .38. The correlation with ERA is even higher. Here’s a scatterplot with a trendline. What could be more scientific-seeming than that little diagonal dotted line?

Eleven times this season, Gausman has put up a game score of 60 or better. He had a Stubble Score of 3.0 or higher in 10 of those 11 starts. When Gausman has been at his best, his beard has been at its bushiest. Once again, even when we throw out that clean-shaven abomination, the ERA tells a pretty convincing tale:

Normally, this is the part of the article where I’d throw in a bunch of caveats. Let’s watch out for small sample sizes and conflating variables and batted ball luck and so on. But we’re writing about something important today, so I don’t want to get bogged down in minor details like logic and analytical rigor. Everybody knows that whenever a player performs better in the second half, there’s one simple narrative that can explain it perfectly. That’s just science.

Sure, the correlation between Gausman’s Stubble Score and his game score is almost exactly the same as the correlations between his Stubble Score and his strand rate and BABIP, two classic indicators of luck. And sure, the strongest correlation I found was literally just to the date, indicating that this recent hot stretch has simply happened to coincide with some less fastidious grooming, rather than being caused by it. And as long as we’re piling on the sures, nine of Gausman’s 11 worst starts this season came when he had a facial hair rating of 3.0 or higher. But let’s ignore all that and remember that very official looking dotted trendline. There’s no need to get so nerdy that we let our perfectly tidy narrative get all rough and rugged, like an unshaved Kevin Gausman mowing down opposing batters. Let’s declare victory. Fear the beard. Cheer the beard. Correlation is causation. I’m pretty sure I heard that somewhere.

Now that the charts have conclusively demonstrated the power of Gausman’s beard, we can turn our attention to a number of other questions that need answering. For instance, does this mean that Keegan Matheson and his immaculate beard could win a Cy Young if they felt so inclined? Should Gausman head down to Spirit Halloween and buy a Gandalf costume, just on the off chance that a fake beard works as well as a real one and he turns into the second coming of Pedro Martinez? How many months would it take for him to grow a beard full enough that that little hairless patch on his right cheek would finally fill in? If this is truly a Samson situation (and here let’s note that Samson was the son of Manoah), should we shove Gausman into the batter’s box and see what happens when he takes some cuts with the jawbone of an ass?

I’m sure we’ll answer all of these questions sooner or later, especially the jawbone one. In the meantime, I’d encourage the Blue Jays clubbies to dig through Gausman’s locker and confiscate his trimmer.