Noticing Kevin Gausman

Remember life before Mike Trout? There was less joy in the world and the Angels didn’t have to spend so much money on new baseballs. There were also different expectations placed on young players. Because of Trout, though, and the era of players he ushered in, the way we look at prospect timelines has changed. Trout was the best player in baseball at age 20 and has been great ever since. Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and plenty of other newcomers have taken the sport by storm with awesome debuts. Carlos Correa! Kris Bryant! Francisco Lindor! Top prospects now burst onto the scene and are immediately awesome. It’s fun to watch.

But it can also be distracting. The Trout-led immediacy has moved us to forget about players who don’t excel right away. I’m not just talking about mid-level prospects who aren’t getting their due, I’m thinking about good prospects who don’t have four-win seasons prior to their 23rd birthdays.

There’s an attention gap between the year you lose prospect status and the year you show up near the top of the leaderboards for the first time. Once a player loses his rookie eligibility but before he’s fully reached his cruising altitude, we sort of lose track of them unless they play for our favorite team.

Consider Kevin Gausman. Prior to the 2013 season, he was 13th on Baseball Prospectus’ prospect list, 15th on our list at FanGraphs, and 26th at Baseball America and per Keith Law. After a high-ERA, good peripheral, 47.2 inning cup of coffee in 2013, he came in at 10th for Baseball Prospectus, 20th for Baseball America, 23rd for ESPN,  and 25th for FanGraphs entering 2014. Clearly, Gausman was believed to be one of the better prospects in baseball going into the year. Prospect ranking doesn’t guarantee anything, but it’s a good barometer of industry opinion and the industry thought highly of Gausman on the eve of his first full season in the show.

Two years later, excitement surrounding Gausman is relatively nonexistent. It’s been two years since his debut and he hasn’t cracked 2.5 WAR in either season. It’s not so much that people openly discuss him as a bust, but rather that he went from being one of the more prominent young pitchers in the game to someone you might not recognize if he was ordering crab cakes at the table next to yours. Interestingly, Gausman has actually pitched pretty darn well over the last two seasons. It’s just been a bit hard to notice.

Due to an injury in May 2015 and some shuffling to the bullpen and the minors over the last two years, Gausman hasn’t thrown 115 MLB innings in either season. As a result, he doesn’t “qualify” for the ERA title (i.e. 162 innings pitched) and doesn’t show up on most leaderboards automatically. In other words, you have to actually go an seek out his statistics if you want to see how he’s been doing. He’s out of sight and out of mind for many.

No one would argue he’s been a workhorse, but pitchers typically don’t have massive workloads at age 23 and 24. If we defaulted to a 100 IP minimum, he wouldn’t show up near the top in WAR or anything, but his contact rate allowed would come in right around Masahiro Tanaka, Felix Hernandez, and Carlos Martinez in 2015. A low innings number isn’t an argument in favor of Gausman as a good pitcher, but it is a small reason why we’re less likely to notice him and realize he’s still on track for a really nice career.

Consider, instead, his 2014 and 2015 seasons as one unit. It’s 225.2 innings of work over 37 starts and eight relief outings. That’s a bit more than a full season, but it’s in the neighborhood of a full season. Over those two years he’s produced a 3.6 WAR and 3.3 RA9-WAR, which would be very good marks for a pitcher in his first or second full season.

If you take 3.6 WAR and scale it to 200 innings, that leaves you at 3.2 WAR/200 IP over his age-23 to -24 seasons. To give you a sense of context, only three pitchers age 23 or 24 had better total WAR in 2015 than 3.2: Gerrit Cole (5.4), Shelby Miller (3.4). and Carlos Martinez (3.4).

For comparison, Yordano Ventura had 3.3 WAR/200 IP in 2015. Only five pitchers aged 23-24 even threw 180-plus innings last year. Gausman threw under 115 innings, but if you look at his body of work over the last two seasons, it stacks up with good performances for the age group.

If you expand it further and look at players’ combined performances at age 23 and 24 since 2009 (min. 150 IP), Gausman is 29th in park-adjusted FIP (92), right between David Price and Ventura. Pitchers like Madison Bumgarner, Sonny Gray, Max Scherzer, and Alex Cobb are just ahead between 87 and 91 FIP-. Gausman hasn’t performed at an elite level by any means, but if you put his performance in context, he’s on a really good path.

Gausman had a $4.3 million signing bonus but has made the league minimum in each of his three major league seasons. More importantly, he has fewer than two years of service time and remains under team control until after the 2020 season. Barring more time in the minors, he’ll be a Super Two player (assuming it exists in its current form) after next year. So now might be the time for the Orioles to make Gausman a long-term offer to stay in Baltimore for years to come.

The Ventura contract, five years and $23 million plus two $12 million options, seems like a reasonable place to start. Ventura signed the deal just before turning 24 and Gausman would likely sign it just before turning 25, but the service time and basic resumes line up well. Maybe Gausman saved his bonus and can hold out for more with the knowledge that he’s almost definitely going to achieve Super Two status. Call it five years and $30 million with two or three $12-$14 million options?

While it might not seem urgent at first, locking Gausman’s price in now is exactly the kind of move the Orioles need to make this winter. First, for a team that is somewhat constrained in the payroll department and lives in a hitter-friendly park, holding on to good, young pitching is especially important. The team doesn’t have the financial flexibility to go out and sign $18 million AAV pitchers on a whim, so retaining a potential #2 starter for below market rates through his prime is a winning strategy.

But locking a player into that price range requires that you take on some risk by offering the guaranteed money before they establish themselves completely. And even if Gausman doesn’t take a step forward, there are worse things in the world than averaging $6 million per season for a middle-of-the-road starter or good reliever.

And there are some reasons to think there’s a good deal of upside left in Gausman. He’s thrown the ball like a three-win pitcher over the course of his career but it wouldn’t be shocking to see a 4-5 WAR season in the near future. For one, his strikeout rate was up and his walk rate was down in 2015 compared to 2014. The only thing that bit him was a increase home run rate, and while that’s a concern, when you pair it with a solid increase in Soft% allowed and a 3.4-point drop in Contact%, you’ve got yourself a nice little trend overall.

He averaged a 96.5 mph fastball in 2015, which was up about half a mile per hour from 2014 (although a few relief outings probably helped). He relies on that pitch and can hit 100 and 101 when he needs to. In fact, he’s been relatively successful relying on his fastball 60-70% of the time. If he can develop his other offerings even a little more as he ages, he could be extremely dangerous. There’s definitely potential for at least one of his slider or splitter to become consistently above average.

It’s a strange situation overall in that the Orioles haven’t attempted to push Gausman terribly hard over the first couple of years of his career. Perhaps it cost them in 2014, but given that they made the ALCS, it’s hard to make that case. As a result, Gausman has only burned through one year of service time and hasn’t logged a ton of mileage on his arm. That arrangement has kept him out of the headlines, but it might also give the Orioles a shot to lock up a potentially great pitcher for pennies on the dollar. If he already had two years of service and a pair of 170-plus inning seasons under his belt, the cost of an extension would be much higher.

The only major downside to Gausman, other than that he’s a pitcher and pitchers will ruin anyone who believes in their health, is that Gausman went ahead and had LASIK this offseason. While that sounds like a good thing, it means he’ll likely lose the goggles. Fortunately, there’s a pretty good chance that 2016 will feature Gausman’s breakout year and the less compelling appearance will be easier to absorb.