Trey Yesavage calls his pitching style “very over the top,” and it’s the rookie right-hander’s high-trajectory arsenal that the Toronto Blue Jays will turn to on Saturday as they try to secure the American League East title.
If it seems like a tall task — a very over-the-top task, even — for a pitcher in just his third career big-league start, that’s because it is. But the 22-year-old Yesavage has demonstrated he isn’t just any old rookie, having been thrown into the fire to help the Blue Jays clinch a playoff spot in start No. 2 after tossing a franchise record-setting nine strikeouts in his MLB debut just 12 days ago.
“I thought I was pretty cool and collected during that first start,” a grinning Yesavage told Sportsnet a couple days before he was set to make his third. He’ll face the Tampa Bay Rays again (Sportsnet, 3 p.m. ET / noon PT), the same team he debuted against less than two weeks ago when he went five innings, giving up three hits, a pair of walks and one run alongside those nine punch-outs.
This third appearance is Yesavage’s biggest yet, since the Blue Jays are still tied with the New York Yankees in the AL East, but holding the tiebreaker advantage and therefore controlling their destiny. A win Saturday by Toronto and a loss from New York means the Blue Jays earn the AL’s top seed, with one game remaining in the regular season for both teams on Sunday afternoon.
Right now the magic number is two, and the ball is in Yesavage’s hand for his first start at Rogers Centre.
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The rookie says chatting with the Blue Jays’ other starters has been among the best parts of his early experience in Toronto. “Like Max (Scherzer) and (Kevin) Gausman, just everybody, the entire starting pitching rotation,” he said. “It’s cool to be surrounded by those vets that have been doing this for a while, and me at 22 years old being able to interact with them.
“I’m just really happy to be here,” Yesavage added, looking out onto the field in front of him. “It’s a special group to be a part of, a special city to get to represent.”
This season, Toronto’s 2024 first-round draft pick has demonstrated he’s plenty special himself. Yesavage climbed four levels of the minor leagues before arriving in Toronto. In his dream scenario, he expected getting to the Big Leagues would’ve taken at least a season-and-a-half, if not two.
“I never thought it would be my first season,” Yesavage said. “I was able to, every affiliate I was at, make the adjustments I needed to accommodate to better competition as I went up, and was able to just out-pitch the hitters.”
Yesavage has shown himself to be a quick learner, ready for moments before he even anticipated them. He says he didn’t start “really pitching” until he was 15 years old. He liked hitting, so he most often played third and rarely pitched. “I couldn’t really command the strike zone very well,” he said of his early playing days.
Yesavage did find that strike zone, and always had that over-the-top style, “from as far back as I can remember,” he said.
George Springer wracked his brain and looked up as he thought about whether he’d seen a pitcher with a release point as high as Yesavage’s in his 12 MLB seasons. Springer pointed to Tampa Bay’s Bryan Baker, who’s six-foot-six, as maybe comparable, before deciding: “Not really. It’s pretty interesting.”
What makes that high release point hard on batters is the angle the ball comes down on as it heads toward the plate. “It can lead to some deception of where the ball is,” Springer explained. “That’s why you see a lot of guys swinging at stuff in the dirt, it’s because their eyes are saying that the ball’s higher, but it’s not, it’s because he’s releasing it from up higher.”
Blue Jays reliever Jeff Hoffman has been following Yesavage’s career ever since Yesavage turned pro, since they’re both East Carolina University grads, and Hoffman keeps track of fellow alumni.
“His arsenal plays really well with his delivery. He throws that four-seam fastball and a splitter, which looks a lot like a fastball when it comes out of the hand, and he plays a north-south game,” Hoffman said. “What makes it really hard for people to hit him is when he’s throwing both pitches in the zone, when he’s throwing the fastball up and down, because then there’s no way of telling when the splitter is coming down, and it’s just bottoming out and hitting the ground.”
Given Yesavage’s arm reaches seven feet and two inches in the air as he throws the ball, Hoffman considers whether teams are having to reset their Trajekt pitching machines — the robotic devices that mimic pitcher’s arm angles, release points and pitch trajectories — to better prepare for Toronto’s newest starter. “Maybe they’re putting the machine up higher on a bucket or something,” Hoffman said. “I don’t know, but I would imagine they’re trying to replicate it somehow to try and get those reps.”
“No one throws at as high of a release point than I have, so it is unknown to many hitters,” Yesavage explained. “They’ve never seen that before. It allows my pitches to just tunnel off each other, where the heater has some ride to it, and then the splitter plays the exact same way, but at the last second it drops.”
He also has what he agrees looks like some extra torque to his body as he follows through and releases the ball, and he isn’t sure if that’s because he’s starting his pitching motion from as high as his six-foot-four frame can reach. “I kind of get in that back hip and just explode over the top,” Yesavage said. “Instead of being a side-to-side rotational pitcher, I’m trying to rotate vertically.”
The first time Yesavage showcased that style in the big leagues, he gave up a pair of hits to the first two batters he faced, but that first inning and early run was the only big trouble he encountered. He settled in, and the Rays couldn’t solve him through four more scoreless innings in an eventual 2-1 extra-innings Blue Jays victory.
“You couldn’t really draw up a better one for your first time out, in the middle of a playoff race, against a good team that always plays us tough,” Hoffman said. “He seemed like he had complete control over himself, and he executed a lot of pitches, so that’s more than you can ask for with a kid that has never been in that environment before.”
Yesavage has been in this Blue Jays environment for so little time that he doesn’t even have a nickname yet, not even with “Savage” built right in. “There is a lot of potential there,” Hoffman said. “I think we’ll come up with a good one.”
It’s still early, though, so there’s time to think it over. But it’s not early enough for the pitcher who’s currently living in a hotel at the Rogers Centre to make his third start with the potential to clinch the AL East title.
Some in baseball wondered if it was risky to call on Yesavage so soon and at such a pivotal part of the season, but teammates never thought so given what he’d shown at every level, and since the Blue Jays trusted him at the top level when it matters most.
“Nobody throws like that in this league, so I think you kind of have a little bit of an edge right there,” Hoffman said.
“He’s shown that he can do it,” Springer added. “He looks ready to me.”
