Kevin Gausman: 2022 Fantasy Baseball Bust?

One of the best picks in 2021 drafts turned out to be San Francisco Giants pitcher Kevin Gausman. He pitched like a bonafide ace for most of the year, beating his ADP by a dozen or so rounds.

He rode that great season to a new contract with the Toronto Blue Jays, who signed him for a huge five-year deal. All of this has him going inside the top-70 picks for 2022, being drafted as an SP2 for fantasy purposes.

There are plenty of issues to worry about with Gausman, and those do not seem to be properly baked into his current ADP. I will make the case for avoiding Gausman in drafts this year.

A Career Year at Age 30

Don't get me wrong here, a 30-year-old pitcher is far from being "over the hill." In fact, we have seen plenty of examples in recent years of pitchers putting up some of their best work in their mid-thirties. With Gausman, however, things are a bit different. He crushed his career averages in 2021:

While there are exceptions to every rule, beating your career averages by this much at an age above 30 certainly should raise some red flags. It is very possible that he just finally figured it out and 2021 will prove to be a pivot point for his career when all is said and done, but as we sit here in the middle of it, we can't be overly confident about it. We need to tread lightly here.

Splitter Reliance

Gausman made his living with the splitter in 2021. Check out the numbers broken down by pitch type:

The pitch was dominant with a 25% SwStr%. I looked league-wide for individual pitches thrown at least 500 times with an SwStr% at 25% or better and found just five pitches:

For the full year, Gausman threw 1,062 splitters. The next highest in splitters thrown was Frankie Montas at 678. It is not a commonly thrown pitch. Only a few dozen pitchers even threw 100 splitters last year.

Gausman has always thrown this pitch, but he ramped up the usage to 35% last season. He had a similar usage on the pitch in 2019, but with much worse results on the pitch.

I'm saying all good things about Gausman here, but here's the problem. The splitter just does not seem to be a pitch that we can rely on being steady start-to-start or year-to-year. Now, Gausman certainly had it working for him for all of 2021 (he threw at least 20 of them in each start but one), so maybe he is the exception to the general rule here as well - but overall I am going to continue to be skeptical of pitchers that rely so heavily on such a volatile pitch like the splitter. Any decline in the effectiveness of this pitch could really derail him, as the rest of his arsenal makes him look more like a decent pitcher rather than a great one.

Division Change

I took an in-depth look at the 2021 strength of schedule for pitchers earlier this offseason. You can find that analysis here. I'll share again the division summaries in terms of the strength of schedule for each division's pitchers.

You can see that the NL West tied for the easiest schedules faced. That division had two and a half really good offenses (the Dodgers, Giants, and Rockies in Coors), a pretty middling unit (Padres), and then 1.5 truly awful offensive teams (Diamondbacks and Rockies on the road). Since Gausman was a Giant, he didn't face the Giants, making it a pretty good division to pitch in. Here is how Gausman's innings broke down by opponent faced:

A total of 49 innings against the Padres and Dodgers is no walk-in-the-park, but you can see how many innings he ran up against some pretty anemic offenses. He threw more than 62 innings against the likes of the Diamondbacks, Cubs, Rockies, and Pirates. Getting to face those teams in 2021 was a huge boon to his statistics, and Gausman took advantage, allowing just 18 earned runs in those 62.1 innings (a 2.60 ERA). To his credit, he fared just fine against the Dodgers (3.21 ERA in 14 innings) and Padres (3.09 ERA in 35 innings) as well, so this isn't a guy who got to his strong line just by exploiting weaker competition.

Getting back to the strength of the schedule table, you can see that Gausman will move into what was the toughest division to pitch in last year. The average hitter that an AL East pitcher faced had a slugging percentage of .422 in 2021, far ahead of the .408 a pitcher would face in the NL West.

To get a better idea of what a Blue Jays pitcher will have to face over 162 games, let's look at the opponent breakdown for Robbie Ray last year, who spent the entire year in a Toronto uniform and threw 193.1 innings with the team.

You can expect about one-third of Gausman's innings to be thrown against the likes of the Red Sox, Rays, Yankees, and Orioles. The Sox and Yankees will have very good offenses this year, the Rays will probably be middle-of-the-pack, and the Orioles will be a relatively easy matchup for him. Pitching in the AL East is easier for pitchers wearing a Blue Jays uniform, to be sure, but it's certainly a downgrade.

All of that is not even to mention ballpark factors. Per ESPN, last year Rogers Centre was the seventh-toughest park to pitch in by run factor (I am not counting the Dunedin and Buffalo here because those parks won't be used in 2022). AT&T Park in San Francisco came in at number 17. When looking at home runs, Rogers Centre was #10, and AT&T was #27. There are different ways to measure these things, but every way of looking at it will point to a significant park downgrade for Gausman.

Conclusion

None of these three factors by themselves make for a super compelling reason to fade Gausman in drafts this year, but the three taken together make it pretty easy for me to scratch him off my list (unless the rest of my league does the same and falls rapidly towards pick 100, of course). All the signals are pointing in the wrong direction for Gausman here; let someone else take the risk.

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