SARASOTA, Fla. -- Sometimes, spring training is utterly meaningless. Other times, it's a microcosm of what's to come. Take the first Saturday night this month, for example.
It's the sixth Grapefruit League game the Baltimore Orioles have played, and so far they've yet to win any of them. Not only that, but they've been getting blown out: 11-4 by the Braves; 10-3 by the Rays; 13-2 by the Twins. Ouch, ouch and ouch.
To be fair, in those first five contests, only two of the pitchers in the team's projected rotation have taken the mound. But both of them have gotten absolutely pummeled. In the home opener on March 2, Ubaldo Jimenez got torched for six runs in 1/3 of an inning. The very next day, Miguel Gonzalez allowed seven runs on eight hits in 1 1/3 innings. For all of those who proclaim that Baltimore's starters will again spell the team's downfall (and there is no shortage of these people), the early ugliness has only fueled the fire.
By the time Kevin Gausman toes the rubber on an unusually cool evening in southwest Florida, every O's fan from Sarasota to Severna Park is thinking the same thing: We need him to be the stopper. Which is absolutely preposterous, because everyone knows that there's no such thing as a spring training stopper.
Or is there?
Gausman proceeds to mow down the Rays, giving up one hit over two innings. He fans three and faces the minimum six batters. He's so efficient that after getting pulled, he goes to the bullpen and throws a little more, just to make sure he gets to his budgeted 40-pitch allotment.
After the game, a booming 10-minute fireworks display lights up the sky over Ed Smith Stadium. The noise is only slightly louder than the collective sigh of relief from the 7,500 spectators who watched Gausman pitch.
Savior is too strong a word, but not by much.
The Orioles have spent $242 million on free-agent signings since the end of last season, the fourth most in baseball. Their estimated 2016 payroll sits at $153 million, the highest in franchise history and $35 million more than last year's previous record. But despite the splurge, there's a perception that the team isn't all that different from the 2015 vintage that needed a season-ending five-game winning streak just to finish at .500.
Most of that money (82 percent) went toward re-signing Chris Davis, Darren O'Day and Matt Wieters. A relatively small sliver (9 percent) was spent on pitcher Yovani Gallardo, who appears to be an even swap (at best) for dearly departed Wei-Yin Chen (since 2012, both hurlers have accrued exactly 10.0 WAR). The remaining piece of the pie went to Korean import Hyun Soo Kim, who's struggled early against major league pitching, and last-minute addition Pedro Alvarez. Put it all together and the difference between the 2015 Orioles and the 2016 Orioles seems to be roughly equivalent to the difference between sodium chloride and salt.
The hope in Baltimore is that this year's team will look less like last year's, and more like the 2014 club that won 96 games and advanced to the American League Championship Series. But for that to happen, the starting rotation must pitch less like the group that posted a 4.53 ERA last year (14th in the AL), and more like the 2014 bunch that was lights out after the All-Star break. Because the lineup can and will score, just like it did last year. Just like it did the year before. It's the rotation that's the big question mark. Actually, it's a bunch of big question marks.
Can Gonzalez stay healthy? Can Jimenez put two good halves together? How much does Gallardo have left in the tank? Can Chris Tillman erase the memory of an abysmal 2015? But perhaps the biggest question of all is this:
Is Kevin Gausman ready to make the leap?
The last time the Orioles hit on a pitcher they drafted in the first round -- like, really, really nailed it -- Gausman wasn't even born yet. The year was 1990, and the pick was Mike Mussina. Selected 20th overall, Mussina went on to win 147 games for Baltimore, not to mention another 123 for the Yankees. Since then, the O's have taken 18 pitchers in the first round, and those pitchers have combined to win an average of 6.1 games -- for their entire careers.
Perhaps even more alarming is this: Since 1991, of the 579 first-round pitchers that have been selected, 90 of them have gone on to win at least 40 games in the majors. None of those 90 pitchers were drafted by the Orioles. Their biggest success story? That'd be Jay Powell, who earned every one of his 36 wins pitching out of the bullpen for teams other than Baltimore. Next is Brian Matusz (27 wins), who's managed to carve out a nice career as a lefty reliever, but that's probably not what the O's envisioned back in 2008, when they used the fourth overall pick on him. It's not like the odds weren't stacked in Baltimore's favor: Thanks to a string of 14 consecutive sub-.500 seasons from 1998 to 2011, seven of those 18 first-rounders have been top-10 picks, and a handful have been in the top five.
All of this is to say that, when it comes to drafting and growing hurlers, you'd have to look real hard to find a team that's had less success over the last quarter century than the Birds.
"The Orioles have been hard-pressed to develop their own starting pitchers," said GM Dan Duquette, who joined Baltimore in November 2011 and, seven months later, used his very first draft pick on Gausman. "If Kevin can emerge as a top-flight starter, that would be a big boost for the club."
The fourth overall selection in 2012, Gausman is currently listed as the team's No. 5 starter on the depth chart. But with a riding four-seam fastball that approaches triple digits and a knee-buckling splitter to boot, the prevailing assumption is that Gausman is the future ace. Given the current state of Baltimore's rotation, the hope among O's fans is that the future comes early. Like, now.
For a guy who's about to enter his first full season as a big league starter, that's a whole lot of pressure. Not that it bothers Gausman.
"If you want to be great, you have to deal with pressure," the 25-year-old righty said the morning after his spring training debut. "You can't just pitch great when there's no fans there. You have to perform in front of 40,000 people who are heckling you. So you better embrace it."
Embracing pressure is something Gausman knows a thing or two about.
As a sophomore at LSU in 2012, he started and won the College World Series regional semifinal game against Oregon State, then in the super regional against Stony Brook, he came on in the 12th inning of a tie game and got the win in relief. Two years later, at the tender age of 23, he made his first big league playoff appearance against Detroit in Game 2 of the American League Division Series. After entering in the fourth with the O's trailing 5-2, he quieted the heavy-hitting Tigers, striking out five over 3 2/3 innings and playing a crucial role in Baltimore's 7-6 comeback win. But maybe the hardest thing he's had to deal with is being a regular on the "Norfolk Shuttle."
Perhaps more than any team in the majors, the Orioles are known for using their entire 40-man roster to the fullest extent, routinely sending players who still have minor league options back and forth between Baltimore and their Triple-A affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia. More often than not, those players tend to be pitchers, summoned to help a depleted relief corps or fill a spot in the rotation. "I think we do a good job with the bullpen and using the pitchers selectively," Duquette said. "Ideally, you'd like to have four horses in the rotation, but we don't have that luxury right now." And so the shuttle rolls on.
Gausman's inaugural launch came in 2013, the same year Baltimore dealt its 2007 fifth-round pick, Jake Arrieta, to the Chicago Cubs, for whom he would win a Cy Young two seasons later. At the time, Gausman had just 61 professional innings on his résumé.
"He kind of got rushed because we weren't that stable of a rotation here," Tillman said. "He didn't really get to learn pitching."
The on-the-job training -- and the shuttling -- continued over the next two seasons, as the Orioles traded fellow pitching prospects like Eduardo Rodriguez and Zach Davies in deadline deals. All in all, over the past three years, Gausman has done a total of 20 legs on the shuttle: Ten times he's been optioned to the minors, and 10 times he's been called back up to the big club. If you think that doesn't take a mental toll, think again.
"It sucks," said closer Zach Britton, a converted starter and former third-round pick who used to be a frequent flyer on the Norfolk Shuttle. "Teams can do it and there's nothing wrong with it, but it sucks. You come in the clubhouse and you're like, 'Is today the day they're going to send me back down?' There's so much stress involved. It's hard to focus."
Added Tillman, another shuttle alum: "It can mess with your mind."
Especially when you feel like you've done enough to stick around.
"The toughest ones are when you're pitching really well and you're comfortable and then you get sent down," said Gausman, who was shipped out in June 2014 after a dominant stint in which he won three straight starts and allowed just two runs in 19 innings.
The constant transition has left many Orioles fans, fearful of the organization squandering yet another blue-chip pitching prospect, scratching their heads. It's a concern that's not lost on Dan Duquette.
"In retrospect," the O's GM said, "if we provided a little more continuity and structure, that may have been more helpful to Kevin. But that's water under the bridge. He has an opportunity to emerge as a front-line starter."
As for Gausman himself, he doesn't have any issues with how he's been handled.
"I understand that it's a business," he said. "We're trying to keep all those guys healthy out in the bullpen, and I would do it again in a heartbeat just to save a guy from getting hurt."
Gausman's words are a testament to the even-keeled attitude that's helped him get to where he is, on the precipice of blossoming into the one of baseball's top young hurlers.
"It's a maturity thing," said Tillman of Gausman, who is engaged to be married in December and is one of the youngest members of a gated Baton Rouge community where, last offseason, he bought his first house. "You never heard him complain once. When he got sent down, he never got too low. A lot of guys can't do that. Now he's here to stay, and the sky's the limit for him."
Besides being in the bigs to stay, Gausman also appears to be in the rotation for good -- finally.
Since making his major league debut in 2013, the lanky, 6-foot-3 Gausman has gone from starter to reliever, then back to starter, then back to reliever, and finally back to starter again. While critics have worried about how the lack of a consistent role might affect his long-term development, Gausman believes that his time in the bullpen has been instrumental in molding him into the starter he is today.
"That's where I learned how to dominate at this level," he said.
Reliever Darren O'Day agrees. "He learned how to get himself out of jams," said the Orioles' setup man, whose spring training locker is next to Gausman's for the third year in a row. "He learned how to pitch with guys on second and third and one out. He learned that when you have an arm like his, you can be your own reliever."
"You learn stuff every day that makes you shake your head and wonder why you didn't think of it before." Kevin Gausman
Added Gausman: "When I get in certain situations, I go back to that bullpen mentality. Sometimes you need to get a strikeout. You gotta dig deep and bring out your best stuff."
For him, that means high heat.
Thanks to the tight spin Gausman is able to get on his four-seam fastball, it rises. Or at least it appears to rise. In reality, according to the laws of physics, it resists sinking. In fact, according to Pitch F/X data, last year Gausman's heater was the 10th-most sink-resistant in the majors (minimum 100 innings pitched), which is to say that it had the 10th-most "rise," or upward vertical movement. But it wasn't until last season that he really started capitalizing on it.
In 2014, when Gausman threw his four-seam fastball with an 0-2 count, he located it in the upper half of the strike zone 53 percent of the time. That season, hitters posted a .737 OPS on 0-2 heaters against him, and he averaged 7.0 strikeouts per nine innings, a relatively low number for a guy with high-90s cheese. Last year, instead of trying to keep the ball down like young pitchers are taught growing up, he made a conscious decision to play to his strength more. Using the helmet of his catcher as a key ("I try to throw above the mask"), he elevated his four-seamer 72 percent of the time on 0-2 counts. In related news, he limited hitters to a .406 OPS in those situations, and his K rate spiked to 8.3 per nine innings. "That was a huge pitch for me last year," Gausman said. "Hitters see a fastball up and think they can get to it. Luckily for us, they can't." Which begs the obvious question: Why did it take so long for him to realize the benefits of elevating?
"You learn stuff every day," Gausman said, "that makes you shake your head and wonder why you didn't think of it before." This spring, he's been working on adding the curveball that he threw in college back to his repertoire. After allowing 17 homers in 112 innings last year, he could also stand to do a better job of keeping the ball in the park. It's all part of the process, and Gausman is thrilled that, this season, he'll have more opportunity than ever to flatten the learning curve.
"It's the first spring training where I came to camp already penciled into the rotation, and that's exciting," he said. "It's my first year being able to let go. I don't have an innings cap. Just go out there and pitch every fifth day."
For now, he's listed as the No. 5 guy. But if everything goes according to plan, Gausman -- and the Orioles -- could experience some vertical movement of their own.