The Blue Jays enter Sunday on a three-game winning streak and three games ahead of the Yankees in the AL East as they try to seal their first division title since 2015. Time to bring in a reinforcement to push them over the edge like, say, the top prospect in the organization and one of the top pitching prospects in all of baseball.
Selected 20th overall last year out of East Carolina, the 6-foot-4 right-hander has dominated the Minors in his first full season, and by that, we virtually mean the entire Minor Leagues — he has played for every full-season affiliate in 2025. He’s fanned 160 batters in only 98 innings, sixth-most in the Minors. His 41.1 percent strikeout rate is tops among full-season pitchers (min. 90 IP), beating out fellow recent callups Jonah Tong (40.5) and Payton Tolle (36.5) and fellow Jays farmhand Gage Stanifer (35.5) atop the MiLB leaderboard. He owns a 3.12 ERA and 0.97 WHIP over that span as well.
Yesavage joined Triple-A Buffalo in mid-August and started working in shorter stints this month, including two out of the bullpen. Even his most recent outing — a start on Wednesday in Rochester — lasted only three innings and 34 pitches. It was also his best Triple-A outing to date; he retired all 12 batters (including four by K), threw 28 of those 34 pitches for strikes and got 10 whiffs on 23 swings (43 percent). Considering he was much less efficient three days earlier (18 pitches, eight strikes over just one-third of an inning), that brief gem may have been all Toronto needed to see to give the former ECU ace the final push up the ladder.
All this dominance stems from the fact that Yesavage has one of the most unique deliveries and pitch-movement profiles in all of prospectdom.
Typically when we talk about special deliveries, we talk about funk. (See the Tong and Tim Lincecum comparisons that have dominated baseball spaces since the former’s arrival with the Mets.) But Yesavage looks downright mechanized in his movements. He stays tall in his delivery, dips his pitching arm to his back hip and then fires almost directly over the top with minimal extension on the bump.
The result: His 817 pitches thrown in front of Statcast at Single-A and Triple-A had an average release height of 7.18 inches. The highest average release height in the Majors (min. 750 total pitches) this season is 7.08 inches by Justin Verlander. You have to go back to 2015 and Josh Collmenter (7.23 feet) and Mat Latos (7.21 feet) to find someone with a higher release than Yesavage’s in the Statcast era (since 2015).
So already, batters will have to adjust to seeing the ball come out of a taller release point than any Major Leaguer has seen in a decade. On top of that, his stuff acts in its own odd way. For starters, each of his three main pitches move armside.
At Triple-A, Yesavage worked with a 92-95 mph four-seamer that had 3.9 inches of armside run but stood out much more for its 19.5 inches of induced vertical break and limited 11.8 inches of drop. In other words, it had impressive rise out of that over-the-top release, allowing it to be blown by bats at the top of the zone. Without killer velocity, it could be hit hard when not properly located, however.
Yesavage plays off that with a deadly 81-84 mph splitter. The pitch not only gets around 11 mph separation off the heater but also drops around 20 inches more out of his hand and goes 11-12 inches armside. Lefties found it impossible to touch at the Minors’ top level with a 62.5 whiff percentage and zero hits against it over Yesavage’s six appearances with Buffalo.
Those two offerings are certainly at least plus pitches, but his just plain weirdest pitch might be the slider.
The 86-88 mph breaking ball has similar drop to the splitter (31.8 inches vs. 31.7) — adding to the north-south feel of his arsenal — and a touch less armside movement than the fastball (3.3 inches vs. 3.9). That’s not how sliders typically work. There have been 290 pitchers who have thrown at least 100 sliders in the Majors in 2025; only eight have a slider with armside movement, and none have the horizontal movement equal to Yesavage’s mark of 3.3 inches. Only Dauri Moreta (2.7) comes close. Much more expectedly, the slider is Yesavage’s best pitch against righties, who don’t know what to do with a breaking pitch that technically moves in on them. He’s also thrown an armside curveball at times in 2025 but has mostly pocketed that over the last few months.
This mysterious profile could help Yesavage out of the gate in The Show against batters who frankly don’t have the exposure to his level of extremes, but he’ll have to keep his command reined in to pitch important innings for Toronto down the stretch. He’s fought early bouts of wildness at Single-A, Double-A and Triple-A before settling in with experience. But the Blue Jays, who view Yesavage as a long-term rotation piece, can’t afford that patience with the postseason looming.
Even so, it’s still worth seeing whether Yesavage can help in some capacity — spot starts once through the order, long relief, shorter appearances where he can let it fly — while he still has something left in the tank in ‘25. His 98 innings are only a bit above his 93 1/3 mark as a college junior last year. If he can, Yesavage may not be the only Blue Jay going over the top this fall.
