Fantasy Baseball Today: Kevin Gausman’s strong start may provide the perfect opportunity to sell high, more

I’m gonna be honest: I don’t know what to make of Kevin Gausman right now. 

I want to believe that he’s back to being an ace after a season where he was clearly pitching at less than 100% health due to a shoulder issue. And he sure looked like that on Wednesday, as he limited the Red Sox to just one unearned run on four hits over eight innings with 10 strikeouts. That’s to quality starts in his first three tries, and he only came up two outs short in the other start, with his ERA now down to 2.33 for the season. For a guy with a long track record of ace-level production, shouldn’t it be pretty easy to buy into this strong start?

It’s not easy at all, actually, dear reader! The version of Gausman we have seen this season just doesn’t look very much like the best versions of Gausman we’ve seen in the past.

When Gausman was an ace, he did so largely on the strength of his splitter. It wasn’t his only pitch, obviously, but it was far and away his best pitch – in 2023, for example, Gausman’s four-seamer was pretty good, with a .307 wOBA allowed, but his splitter had a remarkable .255 mark against. And most of his whiffs came with that splitter, too – in that same 2023 season, Gausman’s splitter generated 261 whiffs, compared to 136 for the four-seamer and 41 for his slider. 

Gausman lost his feel for the splitter a bit last season, and that gap shrank as a result. He still had 137 whiffs with his four-seamer in 2024, but his splitter generated just 159, a 39% drop. And he struggled, posting his highest ERA since 2019 and his lowest strikeout rate since 2018. That pitch wasn’t just his bread and butter – it was the whole meal. 

And Gausman’s splitter … still isn’t back! He had four whiffs with it on 19 swings Wednesday, which actually improved his whiff rate with the pitch to 13.5% for the season. It’s still generating plenty of weak contact, but it isn’t the same pitch that used to define his arsenal. 

How did he find so much success Wednesday, then? He generated 13 of his 17 swinging strikes in the game on his four-seamer, which is the third-most he’s ever had with his four-seamer. And it’s not necessarily a fluke – his velocity was down a bit Wednesday, but it has been up prior to this, and he’s generated a lot more rise on the pitch, which is what you’re looking for if a fastball is going to miss a lot of bats.

But I just don’t have much faith in Wednesday being repeatable for Gausman. At the risk of oversimplifying, my skepticism mostly comes down to this: We’ve simply never seen a version of Gausman who has been consistently good without racking up a ton of whiffs with his splitter. His fastball looks legitimately better right now than it used to, but I just don’t buy that this is going to be a sustainable approach for him. 

Maybe I’ll be wrong, but I’m using this start as an exit ramp from the Kevin Gausman experience in 2025. I think he can still be somewhat useful, like he was last season, maybe, but I don’t think we’re going to see a return to Fantasy ace status for Gausman. And if someone wants to value him that way based on Wednesday’s start and his superficially low ERA, take advantage.