Gausman spring debut bumped but MRI clean
Team pleased with potential fifth starter Francis
DUNEDIN, FLA. So, about that marquee starting rotation … You know, the cadre of moundsmen which was ranked No. 3 across baseball in 2023, with a collective ERA of 3.85. Two-fifths short of a peck at the moment.
Manager John Schneider delivered that whistle-by-the-graveyard bulletin on Monday morning with the news that Blue Jays ace Kevin Gausman was ailing with “general shoulder fatigue.” Which knocked the right-hander — merely Toronto’s roto leader with a 3.16 ERA and third-place finisher in AL Cy Young voting — off his preparation stroke, specifically the two innings (some 40 pitches) he’d been slated to throw in live batting practice.
Placing him alongside Alek Manoah among the not-available — scratched from his start this past Sunday with a sore shoulder, which might be a different shade of shoulder ailment from “fatigue.”
The skipper put a no-worries spin on the unwelcome development. And perhaps that’s really all there is to it, right as rain again with a bit of rest. Notably, Gausman had shoulder issues (tendinitis and strain) in 2015, 2016 and 2019. Again, that could just be par for the pitching course. It is, after all, an utterly unhuman kinetic motion, hurling a baseball in the mid-90s m.p.h. over and over again, performance pain allayed by nothing more than ice.
“Gausman was supposed to throw today, didn’t really bounce back from his bullpen,” Schneider explained. “Kind of just popped up.”
The good news: an MRI showed no structural concern, no injury. He’ll be re-evaluated in a couple of days, but delaying Gausman’s spring training debut.
Still and all, that ballyhooed rotation was already facing uncertainty. Although clearly Manoah — invested with the opening-day ball last year — didn’t have much to do with the team’s pitching success in 2023, tumbling far out of his previous season’s glitter and twice demoted before he vanished off the radar.
Manoah “played catch” on Monday, but there’s no timeline yet for a return to game action.
The team isn’t tapped out for starters in the interim or shortterm, however. Alongside José Berríos, Chris Bassitt and Yusei Kikuchi, the Jays are pleased by what Bowden Francis has shown.
The cool-dude 27-year-old was in the roto convo anyway, possibly primed to break camp with the No. 5 job or as a swingman. He’s on tap to start Thursday against the Detroit Tigers and the plan, said Schneider, is to stretch him out to four innings. “I thought he was awesome,” he said of Francis’s two innings of work Saturday, where his fastball touched 97.1 m.p.h. and the splitter was cooking.
“His stuff was there. Everything from velo to location was good, the way he held runners was good. I loved the different speeds between fastball-curveball and then splitcutter in between. But the fact his velo, his stuff was there, as his pitch count went up, that’s what we’re looking at him. His next time out, we’ll keep pushing him.”
Other options, in a worst-case scenario, are Mitch White (though fireballing 98 m.p.h. at the knees, as he did recently, isn’t quite the same coming out of the bullpen versus starting), top prospect Ricky Tiedemann (flashy in a weekend simulated game after a brief sit-down with a left knee/hamstring issue), nonroster invitee Chad Dallas, even Wes Parsons, the 31-year-old who started in Monday’s 5-2 win over the Philadelphia Phillies.
Footnote by a long yard: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. slugged the sass out of a pitch for his first spring training home run, adiós over the centrefield fence.