DUNEDIN, Fla. -- In his right hand, Kevin Gausman is holding a baseball card, looking at a skinny kid from half a lifetime ago.
This is one of the very first cards of Gausman. It’s from a 2009 “USA Star Prospects” by Upper Deck, and an 18-year-old Gausman is leaning on a dugout rail wearing an 18U National Team USA uniform tailored for a much larger man.
“Oh, wow. Young and still skinny,” Gausman says, then he laughs when he reads his weight listed at 185 pounds on the back. “No, this is 160, 150 maybe.”
Gausman still looks like a boy in this photo, lanky with his hair cut short, no stubble just yet. The back of the baseball card tells you that Gausman is “a hard thrower who continues to come into his own” and threw a clean final inning in a win against Aruba that September. That’s when the memories start to come back. Gausman was not the star of this U18 Team USA. It wasn’t even close.
This was one of the greatest collections of teenage talent ever assembled, sent to Venezuela to knock off the Pan-American powerhouse, Cuba.
“We were so much more talented than any other team in that tournament,” Gausman said, grinning at the memory. “I think we run-ruled every team but Cuba in the championship. We had Jameson Taillon. Bryce Harper was our catcher, Manny Machado was our shortstop, Nick Castellanos played third. Robbie Ray was on that team, too. There were so many guys. It was so fun. You knew we probably had five or six first-rounders.”
In the next year’s MLB Draft, Harper, Taillon and Machado went one-two-three. Harper, already a national sensation thanks to that Sports Illustrated cover just months prior, went first to the Nationals. Taillon went second to the Pirates, then Machado third to the Orioles.
“Looking back, it’s even crazier now. Seeing what those two guys alone, Harper and Machado, have made in their career? They’re probably both Hall of Famers,” Gausman said. “I thought Jameson Taillon was the greatest high-school pitcher I’ll ever see in my life. He was 95-96 against Cuba. I think he struck out 16. He was so dominant. In the moment, we knew those guys were really good, but we didn’t know how good they would be.”
His mind doesn’t immediately go to the games, though. Gausman remembers all of the things that made his eyes grow wide. He wasn’t in Colorado any more.
“Everywhere we went, we had their version of a SWAT team with us. They were on dirt bikes with AK-47s,” Gausman said. “It’s pretty sketchy, looking back.”
Their matchup against Venezuela was particularly tense.
“They had a band there, but it was like a military band. They had half the band behind our dugout and half behind the Venezuelan dugout,” Gausman said. “We scored two runs in the first inning and the other side of the band that was behind Venezuela’s dugout came over and stayed behind ours. It was typical Latin American baseball. The best, the whistles, all of that. It was a lot different than anything I’d experienced up until that point.”
The crowd was right on top of these American teenagers. They knew to expect a hostile environment coming in, but it still took some time to grasp exactly what was happening.
“I remember one day, Manny broke a bat,” Gausman begins, another story popping into his mind. “There was this little kid, and in Spanish, he asked Manny if he could have the bat. Manny gives it to him, and then two days later, we’re playing Venezuela. There’s that same kid, banging that broken bat against our chain fence.”
Team USA won the gold medal, a complete power shift in the Pan-Am Junior Championship. Over eight straight wins, they outscored opponents, 99-14. Gausman closed out that final game against Cuba, a massive accomplishment after knocking off the Venezuelan hosts.
There’s still pride in Gausman’s voice when he tells these stories, all these years later. Since that skinny kid leaned on the dugout railing for a photo, he went to LSU, got drafted fourth overall in 2012, became a top prospect, the next great hope, got DFA’d and rose again to stardom. He’s lived a dozen lives in baseball.
As a teenager, he’d even gotten a few basketball offers, joking that it’s a good thing he didn’t end up hooping at a D-3 school in Kansas. Back then, all of Gausman’s lives in baseball were still in front of him.
“That was actually the first time I hit 98,” Gausman said, smiling again at another memory. “The first time I threw 98, it was in Venezuela.”