Article: Kevin Gausman Hints at New Cutter

[Davy Andrews]

It certainly sounds like the Blue Jays ace will be working on a new pitch when spring training starts.

Kevin Gausman might be trying something new. On Sportsnet’s Blair & Barker podcast this weekend, Gausman hinted very strongly at plans to add a cutter to his repertoire, which in 2024 consisted of a four-seam fastball, a splitter, and the occasional slider and sinker. Gausman has been one of the best pitchers in baseball over the past five seasons, going 55-39 with a 3.31 ERA and 3.04 FIP. His 19.9 fWAR over that period ranks third among all pitchers. However, his 2024 season looked a bit different from the four that preceded it, and it’s not hard to see why he might think it’s time for a change. His 3.83 ERA, 4.71 xERA, 3.77 FIP, and 4.22 xFIP were all his highest since at least 2019. His strikeout rate cratered from 31.1% to 21.4%, largely because he stopped being able to fool hitters as well. His chase rate fell, as did his whiff rate both inside and outside the zone.

Clearly, batters were better able to track Gausman’s pitches. They made better swing decisions and made more, louder, contact. A look at the advanced numbers explains the reasons for this. For starters, Gausman's four-seam fastball dropped from 94.6 mph to 93.9 mph, cementing it as below-average in terms of velocity. His splitter also lost just over an inch of induced drop, which meant that by both velocity and movement, it was less of a departure from the four-seamer. His arm angle also fell from 38 to 36 degrees, which likely made the movement of his pitches slightly more predictable to hitters. According to pitching model Stuff+, 2024 was the first time Gausman’s stuff graded out as below average. Gausman couched the addition mainly as an acknowledgment of his declining fastball velocity:

Quote

“I’ve never wanted to throw a cutter because I thought it would take away from how good my four-seam fastball is. Well, now I’m at the point now where I think I should probably maybe have a cutter just in my back pocket in case...I’m not throwing upper 90s all the time anymore. It’s there some days and some days not, and it’s about learning on the fly and being able to recognize, ‘Hey, I don’t have my A-plus fastball today, so I need to really pitch today.’ And that’s where the two-seam came in.”

Gausman added a two-seamer (or sinker) in 2024, throwing it 5% of the time. In effect, it served a bit like a reverse cutter, as its movement profile sat right between his splitter and his four-seamer. We should probably expect that to be a template for a new cutter. In 2024, Gausman was one of the ever-smaller number of pitchers who threw a fastball more than 50% of the time. Clearly, he realizes that he won’t be able to get away with that forever.

So what would Gausman look like with a cutter? Don’t expect the pitch to have much cut, if any. Gausman is a classic pronator, meaning that when he throws, his pitching hand naturally ends up facing outward toward third base. Pronators like Gausman are excellent at getting arm-side run on their pitches, but they struggle to throw breaking balls with glove-side movement. His Baseball Savant pitch movement graph makes that extremely clear. There’s simply nothing at all on the first-base side of the graph. Even his slider barely gets any horizontal break at all.

That big maroon X is roughly where we should expect Gausman’s cutter to go. It will slot in between his four-seamer and slider both in terms of movement and velocity. As Lance Brozdowski has noted, because this pitch probably won’t get any actual cut – it will just have less arm-side movement than the fastball and splitter – stuff models might not like it. However, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be effective.

Cutters are often used to bridge the gap between a four-seamer and a slider. Because they look a little bit like both pitches, they force batters to take an extra fraction of a second to make sure they know what’s coming. However, Gausman threw his slider just 8% of the time in 2024, and the pitch has never performed particularly well. In other words, Gausman will be using his cutter a bit differently than most pitchers. It will just be there to take pressure off his four-seamer and offer hitters a different look.

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[Brock Beauchamp]

Great article, Davy. I was wondering why Gausman took at step back last season, it makes sense he's toying with the idea of adding another offering to offset his four-seam.