Keegan Matheson has a beard. Let’s start from there. Matheson is Blue Jays of MLB.com who beats the writer with a beard. It was a huge, glorious, sharp beard that pressed against his face and everything.
Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman also has a beard. It’s not as glorious as Matheson’s. Right-handers usually choose to grow for a few days, but in recent weeks he has taken a step forward. The cheeks are still spotty. Close-ups show that your individual hair will spread in whatever direction their whimsy brings. Likewise, Gossman often surpasses the stubble status and enters the beginning of beard territory. Gossman has also performed well lately, running 2.25 ERA and 3.00 FIP in the last 10 games.
Matheson watched Gausman cut off the Astros, threw in the closed-door field with nine strikeouts, two walks and one hit rate last Thursday, and made a connection. He posted on Bluesky: “Neurs won’t tell you this because their charts won’t show up, but Kevin Gausman’s recent hot streak is directly related to his beard.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a nerd. I offended it. In the Pantheon of Advice, “Don’t challenge nerds to be nerds” is there, “Relevance does not mean causality”, “Never confront the Sicilians when death is approaching.” challenge accepted.
Gossman has scored 29 starts this season. For each of these, I downloaded a high-resolution image from the photo service, magnified his face, and scored facial hair using our latest Sabermetric Innovation: Stubble Score (Stubble Score (Trademark Targeted)). Then I got these results and checked the correlation with Gossman’s performance:
Let’s break down the scale here first. It ranges from one to five. A completely clean shaved; last week’s bearded Gaild Gausman exercise five. (Matheson’s beard would be 14.) Here’s an example of every integer on scale, so you know what we’re talking about:
Photo points left to right: Vincent Carchietta, John E. Sokolowski, Kevin Sousa, Nick Turchiaro, John E. Sokolowski. Imaging images.
As can be seen from the distribution below, Gossman spends most of his time in the middle, which is what I classify as severe stubble. It’s not a beard, but it’s going to grow more than a day. He had to clean his shave all season long:
I mentioned a clean shaving game because, well, things aren’t going well. It was April 27, and Gossman absolutely lit up, allowing six runs to the Yankees, lasting only 2 2/3 innings. His game score of 23 is the second lowest in his entire season. Oh, I should also mention that he had a glove-wearing beard. Here is a surprising look:
Anyway, even if you throw an outlier in a clean shaving game, Gossman performs better when his beard is even more bearded. The correlation coefficient between his score and match score is .38. It is more relevant to the times. This is a scatter plot with a trend line. What is more scientific than that small diagonal dotted line?
This season, Gossman scored 60 or higher. His 10 of these 11 games scored 3.0 or higher. When Gossman was in his best shape, his beard was always at its smallest. Once again, even if we throw this clean shaving abhorrence, this era tells a compelling story:
Usually, this is part of the article. Let’s beware of small sample sizes and mix variables and hitting luck and more. But, we are writing something important today, so I don’t want to get stuck in smaller details like logic and analytical rigor. Everyone knows that whenever a player performs better in the second half, there is a simple narrative that perfectly explains it. That’s just science.
Of course, the correlation between Gaussman’s residual score and his game score is almost exactly the same as the correlation between his debris score and chain rate and BABIP, which are two classic indicators of luck. Of course, the most solid correlation I found is actually just to date, which suggests that the recent heat stretch is just aligned with some less picky touches and not caused by it. As long as we’re going to pile up on Sures, Gausman’s nine The worst The season started with his facial hair loss rating of 3.0 or higher. But let’s ignore all of this and remember that dotted trend line that looks very official. There is no need to be so nerdy that we make our complete and neat narrative tough and rough, like an unshaved Kevin Gausman cutting off the opponent’s batsman. Let’s declare victory. Fear of beard. Come on for your beard. Relevant is causality. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of it somewhere.
Now that the chart has finally proven the power of the Gaussman beard, we can turn our attention to many other questions that need to be answered. For example, does this mean Keegan Matheson and his Immaculate Beard can win the race car if they feel so inclined? Should Gossman head to Spirit Halloween and buy Gandalf outfits, just fake beard and real beard effect, and he turned into Pedro Martinez’s second temporary? It took him several months to grow enough beard that the hairless patch on his right cheek finally filled up? If this is indeed the case for Samson (let’s note here that the Senator is Manoah’s son), should we push Gossman into the batsman’s box and see what happens when he cuts his jawbone with his butt?
I’m sure we’ll answer all these questions sooner or later, especially Jawbone. Meanwhile, I encourage Blue Jays Clubbies to dig out Gossman’s locker and confiscate his trimmer.
