Kevin Gausman Dug Up an Old Pitching Mechanic He’d Buried for 8 Years. It Might Save His Season.

Kevin Gausman got called for a balk in the second inning Sunday with the bases loaded and two outs. That wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is what he was doing to get that balk call in the first place.

The Blue Jays righty had been pitching from the windup with runners on base, something he hasn’t done in eight years. The home plate umpire caught it and rang him up for the balk, but Gausman didn’t care. Because the whole point of going back to the windup was to fix his fastball, and by that metric, Sunday worked.

Gausman’s heater averaged 95.1 mph against the Padres. That’s a season best for him, and it came after he started messing with his mechanics in his last bullpen session. According to Sportsnet’s Arden Zwelling, Gausman rediscovered a delivery he’d shelved since his early days in Baltimore.

“It’s been eight years, it’s been a while. But I was surprised how good it felt,” Gausman said.

The idea was to stay back in his delivery and stop flying open too early, which had been sapping velocity and making his fastball hittable. It worked well enough that he struck out eight over six innings. He did give up three earned runs — all in that second-inning mess — but settled in after that. Only four hits, three walks, and a lot of swings and misses once he found his rhythm.

The Blue Jays still lost 5-4. Jeff Hoffman gave up an RBI single to Manny Machado in the eighth and a sac fly to Ty France that flipped the lead. Toronto didn’t score in the ninth. So the result wasn’t there, but the mechanical adjustment might be the kind of thing that matters more than one loss in July.

Gausman came into Sunday with a 4.33 ERA across 20 starts. That’s not what the Blue Jays signed up for when they gave him that big contract. He’s got 116 strikeouts in 112.1 innings, so the K stuff is still there. The problem has been the hard contact and the occasional blow-up inning. If a windup change gets his fastball back to where it used to be — consistently 95-plus with that splitter playing off it — that changes the math for the rotation.

Toronto is 45-51 right now, six games under .500. That’s not dead, but it’s not great either. They’re going to need every arm they’ve got if they want to make a run. Gausman finding something that works after eight years of not trying it? That’s the kind of weird late-season development that could actually matter.