TORONTO — Trey Yesavage has done everything but unpack his suitcase this season.
The 22-year-old who made his pro debut on April 8 with Single-A Dunedin will start Game 1 of the World Series for the Blue Jays on Friday night, another step in one of the greatest development stories this organization has ever seen.
Yesavage has called five cities home, lived out of dozens of hotels and still has what’s left of his belongings jammed into a Toyota Tundra parked somewhere beneath Rogers Centre.
“You should see my truck right now. It looks like a mobile home,” Yesavage said on the eve of the World Series.
This is the fun part — depending on your definition of fun — as hundreds of media crowded around players Thursday in the hallways beneath Rogers Centre. For players who have never been to the World Series, it has to be a shock, their own little taste of the Super Bowl’s media day.
At 22 years and 88 days old, Yesavage will be the second-youngest Game 1 starting pitcher in World Series history, behind just the Dodgers’ Ralph Branca (21 years, 267 days) in 1947.
The hard part comes next, and it starts with Shohei Ohtani.
Ohtani will be the first man to walk to the plate Friday night in Game 1, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman trailing behind him. Ohtani feasts on splitters, but that’s also Yesavage’s superpower.
“He’s a special player,” Yesavage said. “He can do damage on both sides of the baseball. But it doesn’t take away the fact that we are in this situation, too, for a reason. So it’s just about going out there and being ourselves, and if there’s adjustments that we need to make to try to neutralize him, we’ll make those adjustments.”
Yesavage is always at his best when he leans into that incredible splitter and his own identity as a pitcher. That’s what has gotten him here so quickly. There’s a throwback edge to Yesavage, too, the quiet confidence no 22-year-old can fake. These aren’t canned lines and Instagram captions; they’re Yesavage as his genuine self, a young man still unaware of just how charismatic he is.
Yesavage doesn’t like to complicate things, either. He’ll take some data into consideration, but you’re not going to catch him scrolling through the computer tablet much in the dugout.
“I’m pretty meat and potatoes with it,” Yesavage said. “Just keep it basic. I don’t want to be out there on the mound thinking too much, because for me, I’m at my best when I’m just blacked out out there and not thinking at all.”
What a journey this has been. If the Blue Jays can pull this off and win their third World Series in franchise history, Yesavage’s story will be told forever. He’ll become a trivia question. He’ll be pointed to by fans of the other 29 teams next summer when they want their organization’s top pitching prospect to be fast-tracked. See, it can work!
Yesavage’s path to the big leagues, starting in Single-A and touching all four full-season levels in the Minors, is rare but not unprecedented.
Yesavage now joins Dylan Smith (2025), Edgardo Henriquez (‘24), Orion Kerkering (‘23), Spencer Strider (‘21), A.J. Minter (‘17), Kendall Graveman (‘14), Addison Reed (‘11), Dan Runzler (‘09) and Daniel Hudson (‘09). The kicker is that none of these pitchers ended up pitching in the World Series, but Strider’s Braves and Henriquez’s Dodgers went on to win championships.
The next domino to fall, of course, is Kevin Gausman as the presumed Game 2 starter. Given that Gausman pitched an inning out of the bullpen in Game 7, this will give him an extra day of rest. It was a complicated decision that brought in all corners of the organization, the veterans on this pitching staff included.
“We tried to talk to all the guys and see how they’re doing physically, see what we have done historically in terms of rest, what it may look like later in the series for certain guys, and then how each one of ’em matches up against the Dodgers,” manager John Schneider said.
“We wanted to kind of get everyone’s feedback, everyone’s input. We have all of ours as coaches and medical staff and game planning, but I want to see how they feel. Just in talking to all those guys, it made sense to hold Kev off for a day.”
Yesavage can become a true “one of one” in Toronto. Sure, the 1993 Blue Jays had some young pitchers like Pat Hentgen, but Hentgen threw 216 1/3 big league innings that year as a 24-year-old, and he had more than 600 innings in the Minors as a prospect.
Yesavage is the new age of pitching, coming faster than ever. Game 1 of the World Series was unimaginable back in April, but the rookie sensation just keeps passing every test.
