This story was excerpted from Keegan Matheson’s Blue Jays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
PHILADELPHIA -- If you really want to see Kevin Gausman light up, ask him about his daughters.
Gausman has lived so many lives in Major League Baseball. He’s been the fourth overall pick in the 2012 Draft and a top prospect, but he’s also struggled, bounced around and been designated for assignment before he was reborn as one of the best pitchers in the sport. All of this happened before fans in Toronto got to know Gausman when he signed with the Blue Jays ahead of the 2022 season.
He’s joked over the years that the younger version of himself could be a hothead at times, especially in those Orioles days, but that feels so far away. Gausman is beloved and respected in the Blue Jays’ clubhouse, and while you still see that fire on the field, he’s a different man off of it. His daughters, Sadie and Sutton, have been such an important part of this.
“For me, it puts more perspective into my life in general,” Gausman said. “It’s hard. We do not see our kids very often. It’s hard, and it’s especially hard on our wives, just with how much we play. Unless you’re travelling everywhere with us -- which is really hard to do, as you know -- it’s just hard to do that. The biggest thing it helped me with is to realize that this is just a game. That puts things into perspective.”
Sadie and Sutton have often been around the ballpark at home in Toronto, which Gausman and his wife, Taylor, chose to call home for these important years of their lives.
A year ago, on Gausman’s bobblehead day, Sadie threw out the first pitch while her dad crouched at home plate to catch it, holding her little sister.
“I’m trying to create a better life for them, but at the end of the day, this is still a game, and I’m still their dad,” Gausman said. “It really helps me on the days I pitch really bad. They don’t care, and they don’t treat me any differently, whereas you can’t really say that about the majority of everybody else.”
It’s still a strange concept for kids, though. Playing baseball can’t possibly be a real job. Gausman won’t be home this Father’s Day morning as the Blue Jays wrap up their series in Philadelphia, but the charter should get back to Toronto later in the evening when he’s done with work.
Now that Sadie is six, she’s started to ask Gausman more about this and ask her mother why dad can’t be home at certain points during the summer. She’s not quite to the point where she’s bugging Gausman about throwing his slider more, but it’s beginning to set in that Rogers Centre is where her dad’s job happens.
At Rogers Centre, like any of the other kids of Blue Jays players, one of their favorite spots is the family room. Even when they travel to road stadiums to watch their dad pitch, they’re asking for the family room, so either Taylor or Kevin need to tell them that there is one … but it’s for the other team’s kids. Building out these family spaces was a major priority for the Blue Jays during their recent renovations, and while it doesn’t mean much to fans, you’d be surprised by how often players with young families bring it up. Word gets around, too.
“I’ve been with five teams now. They’re the best I’ve been with,” Gausman said. “I was also at different points in my career. When I was with the Orioles, I wasn’t paying attention to what the kids' room is like. That’s one thing that was a big question when we were getting recruited to sign here, what were they going to do for the families?”
Gausman has also spoken at length over the years of how important this is for Toronto, in particular. In other U.S. cities, you’re likely to have friends nearby, perhaps from the Minor Leagues or college ball. In Canada, very few American or Latin players have that built-in sense of friends and family when they arrive, so he and other players have been particularly grateful for the work that’s done to help.
Gausman hasn’t quite convinced the girls to take up baseball or softball just yet, with Sadie preferring dance and tennis. He keeps seeing a softball swing in that tennis stroke, though, and as Gausman’s girls grow to understand what baseball means in their lives, they’ll also see how much they’ve meant to their father, even when he’s “at work.”