DUNEDIN, Fla. — Behind every MLB rule change, there’s a real human being.
Behind every tick of the pitch clock, there’s an actual person, trying this spring to hit the reset button and undo years — maybe even a lifetime — of routine and comfort zones.
Behind every new clause in the rule book, there’s somebody in a big-league uniform, wondering why that clause had to go and mess with them, as opposed to those other 2,000 dudes running around spring training.
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So meet Kevin Gausman, “poster boy” for a change few of us had even thought about — including him. How did the Blue Jays right-hander wind up on MLB’s rule change Most Wanted List this spring? He’s a toe-tapper. That’s how.
That was never a problem for, say, Fred Astaire. But it’s a problem for Gausman, because he’s currently starring in a not-so-major motion picture from MLB’s new “Mess with Your Dreamworks” studios.
It’s a little video feature, shown by MLB to managers and media alike this spring, on now-illegal pitching deliveries. And it stars Gausman, along with Houston righty Luis Garcia, as toe-tappers or false-starters whose old delivery is now considered by MLB to be a balk.
So in a world in which balking on every pitch wouldn’t work out real well, Gausman is now a reformed toe-tapper. Wish him luck.
“For me,” Gausman told The Athletic after his first spring start on Friday, “it’s just something comfortable that I’ve done for three or four years now. And so to change it, it’s hard, right?”
Right. It definitely seems hard anyway. Gausman, 32, says this all started when he got traded from the Orioles to the Braves at the trade deadline in 2018. The Braves told him they’d dug in on the data and found he was much more dominating out of the stretch than out of the windup.
So he ditched the full windup, switched to working out of the stretch on every pitch and incorporated a rocking toe-tap to trigger his delivery. It took him a year or so to settle in, but over the past three seasons, he has been one of the best starters in the sport.
FIP leaders, 2020-22 Corbin Burnes 2.40 Kevin Gausman 2.76 Zack Wheeler 2.80
(minimum 400 innings pitched; Source: Baseball Reference / Stathead)
But that was then, back in the pre-rule change era. This is now, when Gausman is spending every day of spring training trying to develop all-new “muscle memory” as he ditches his old, verboten delivery for something new, legal and hopefully as effective.
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The good news is, he made it through his five-out spring debut Friday without being called for a single balk. The bad news is, he said he felt as if he was rushing his delivery at times throughout a messy 30-pitch first inning. And that’s something his team is watching, because if this creeps into Gausman’s head, getting it out of there could be a lot more challenging than writing up any rule change.
“I think like anyone, you don’t want to be the guy that’s the poster boy for it,” said Blue Jays manager John Schneider, “where it’s like, ‘Oh, why are they attacking me? Why are they singling me out?’ But he’s been good (about it).”
Schneider manages human beings for a living. So he doesn’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to understand that when one of those humans is told he needs to reinvent something as basic as his delivery, that’s not something anyone should take for granted.
“I mean, it’s something you’ve done over and over again for so long,” Schneider said. “So to have to relearn it is definitely unique. And at this stage of his career, too, it’s pretty unique.”
So why should you care about this if you’re not from the province of Ontario or if you don’t have Gausman on your fantasy team? Because one of The Athletic’s goals, in our rule change coverage this spring, is to humanize these new rules as much as possible.
Writers Andy McCullough and Jen McCaffrey recently did that with Kenley Jansen, one of the slowest-working pitchers on Planet Earth, who has definitely gotten the pitch-clock memo this spring. Now it’s our turn to do it with Gausman, since he is mixed up in rules crackdowns that are going to affect more pitchers than you’ve probably realized.
So we know you have questions about what the heck is going on here — and so does he, for that matter. How about we try to answer them as best we can. You’re welcome.
Kevin Gausman throws last month as Blue Jays including manager John Schneider, right, look on. (Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA Today)
Why is Gausman’s toe-tap suddenly illegal?
Well, technically, it isn’t “suddenly” illegal. If you’re a stickler for the official rules, you’re probably aware it has always been illegal for any pitcher to make a pitch, with runners on base, without stopping.
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They call that “a balk.” And technically speaking, it has always been a balk, no matter how many thousands have gone uncalled. MLB would point out that last season Gausman was called for two of those balks, a career high. And it was no secret why.
When balks were called in the past, he said, he’d tell himself: “OK, I’ve got to stop. But honestly, I’d usually just have to stop for a couple of innings, and then I could go back to what I used to do. But not now.”
Right. Not now. Because it’s now more illegal than ever. And why is that? Because of — what else? — the pitch clock.
So if Gausman doesn’t stop now, he’s not just deceiving the runner. He’s also … deceiving the pitch-clock operator! And that is really going to be frowned upon in 2023.
Let’s try our best to explain this, because there is nothing more pivotal these days than for the pitch-clock operator to decide when a pitcher has started his motion to the plate. That, you see, is the moment when the pitch-timer countdown — 15 seconds to throw a pitch, 20 seconds with men on base — is supposed to cease.
But think about this. If the pitcher is toe-tapping out there, how is the clock operator supposed to figure out exactly which tap of which toe is the moment when the windup begins?
So if Gausman doesn’t stop now, it’s almost like two balks for the price of one. And he has enough to worry about without focusing on whether he has just confused the guy flipping the pitch-clock switch or the guy on first base. Or was it both?
“You know, for me, the tap has always just kind of been like, I’m just trying to get comfortable, right? And then I go. … It’s a timing thing,” he said. “I’d never even thought of it or used it as a way to mess with the runner.”
Gausman allowed one run in 1 2/3 innings in his spring debut against the Rays. He walked one and struck out three. (Jonathan Dyer / USA Today)
Gausman’s big question: What about Cortes and Cueto?
Here’s a thing that has been on Gausman’s mind: How come his slightly funky delivery is now illegal — but the super-convoluted, mega-funky deliveries of other pitchers are still considered cool, fun and, especially, not balks?
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Excellent question. Don’t you think?
What about (the Marlins’) Johnny Cueto, Gausman asked: “You’re not going to see that anymore, right?” OK, wrong. At a rule demonstration for the media last month in Arizona, Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations, specifically mentioned Cueto as a guy whose gyrations are still considered legal.
“But I guess you can still do the whole thing like what (the Yankees’) Nestor Cortes does,” Gausman went on. “He can still do all that. But I can’t tap my leg. I don’t get that. … If you look at the rule, it says once you start going home, you can’t go back. So I don’t see how that’s allowed.”
2022 PitchingNinja Windup(s) of the Year Award. 🏆 Winner: Nestor Cortes pic.twitter.com/OUKAHHS8JY — Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) November 22, 2022
The Cortes delivery is a never-ending smorgasbord of dips and turns, rocks and rolls. So to someone like Gausman, no wonder it seems vastly more exaggerated, deceptive and borderline sinister than his own tap dancing act.
But here, according to what MLB has told The Athletic, is why Cortes is allowed to spin and hesitate all he wants: A) because he does in fact come to a stop, and B) because once he lifts his front leg to begin his delivery, he can ‘funk up’ the rest of his act all he wants.
That may not seem fair to the toe-tappers. But the rules are the rules are the rules.
When did he get the news? Depends on whom you ask!
About three weeks ago, Gausman rolled into spring training and expressed surprise to the Toronto media that MLB had used him as an example of new-rules illegality, in two February media demonstrations, before anyone told him.
Since then, he has told The Athletic on two occasions that it wasn’t until he’d arrived in Dunedin that he was first informed, in this case by his manager, that his delivery was being used as an example of what was now illegal.
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“It wasn’t brought to my attention until, I think, the first day of camp, or maybe the day before camp started,” he said Friday. “Schneider called me and told me that I was the one that they kind of singled out in the video, and that my toe-tap wasn’t going to be allowed anymore.
“I wish someone would have told me sooner,” he said at another point, “because then I could have gotten more reps (with his new delivery) in the offseason, to try to figure this thing out. But I don’t know. For whatever reason, it wasn’t.”
All right, here’s where this gets confusing. Does it seem odd that Gausman would have been the last to know about all this? It should, because, according to one MLB official, the idea that the player involved was never told before this spring was “just not true.”
According to the official, who said he was not authorized to speak about this matter publicly, Gausman was warned on the field by umpires after a balk call in Baltimore last September. But in addition, MLB says it flagged him by name in a presentation to all 30 managers at the Winter Meetings last December — and in subsequent sessions with Blue Jays staff on multiple occasions since.
Asked if that account was accurate, Schneider had no issues with it: “That’s pretty spot on,” he said.
So how could Gausman not have known until this spring? Even Schneider seemed unsure: “It may be some miscommunication there,” he said. Schneider said Gausman and pitching coach Pete Walker have talked about the changes he’d have to make “quite a bit” since this winter.
All right then. So the “when did he know” part of this remains perplexing. But what about the “now what” part? Fortunately, there’s no dispute about that.
So is there life after toe-taps?
It no longer matters much what Gausman knew before the start of spring camp or when he began the process of relearning the way he throws a baseball. All that matters now is that he knows it’s time to get this figured out. And he’s working on it.
What he used to do: In the past, Gausman said, his delivery consisted of “kind of a constant tap, and then a small, brief hold.” But in MLB’s opinion, that word “brief” has been more like “non-existent.”
What he’s doing now: Essentially, Gausman had to go one of two ways. He could give up the tap completely. Or he could keep tapping his toe, but then come to what the rule book describes as “a discernible stop.” He chose option two.
“Now I think it’s going to be like a one tap, then stop,” he said. “I just think they’re going to be watching me more than anybody. So I need to make sure that I stop.”
In his outing Friday, his conscious effort to tap, then stop, then pitch was on display. But so were his command issues, which caused him to run three consecutive full counts to the first three hitters. Afterward, he said, “It’s felt a little weird, to be honest.”
“You know, you see hitters trying to change their swing (in spring training), and it’s tough, you know?” he said. “We’re all creatures of habit. So we always go back to what we know. So there might be a time where I might eventually do it one pitch (and forget to stop) without even knowing that I’m doing it. And hopefully, the umpires aren’t watching too closely when that happens.”
Um, we wouldn’t count on that. If you’ve watched any spring training baseball, you know there’s a full-fledged balk epidemic breaking out.
Spring training balk calls Year Balks Games Balks/Game 2023 39 129 0.30 2022 18 536 0.03
(through March 4)
Yep, that’s 10 times as many balks per game this spring as last spring! Not all of those calls are for not stopping. But you get the gist of this. Because of the pitch clock, nobody is going to get away with zipping past those “discernible stops.” So for Kevin Gausman, new-rules poster boy, there’s only one option:
Adjust … or … uh-oh.
“It’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “But I’ve kind of accepted that. It is what it is. Superman is not going to show up and change the world just for me. So I’ve got to be able to figure it out. Right?”
(Top photo: Cliff Welch / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)