Perhaps I spoke too soon. I ended up using Net::SFTP::Foreign and writing to a file handle like this: 

open my $handle, '| gunzip -c ';

$ssh->get($remote, $handle) or die "get failed:".$ssh->error;
print "opened handle \n";

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In reply to Re: Reading zipped files with Net::SFTP by amiss
in thread Reading zipped files with Net::SFTP by amiss

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