SEATTLE — Each Trey Yesavage start has vibrated with opportunity and momentum, but until now, there’d been no danger. Tomorrow has always been promised.
Everything has gone right for Yesavage this year. From a distance, you might even think it’s come easy to him. The Blue Jays just kept promoting him and promoting him, trying to find a level that would challenge Yesavage, so he ended up in the big leagues five months after his pro debut at Single-A Dunedin. Still, he’s trying to appreciate that this isn’t how it usually works. These are the seasons some players spend their entire careers chasing.
“This opportunity does not come up very often,” Yesavage said. “I was talking to [Kevin] Gausman the other day, and I said, ‘What’s the furthest you’ve made it in the playoffs?’ And he said, ‘This is the furthest I’ve done.’ And he’s been playing this game for a long time. So I’m very blessed to be in this situation, and I not only want to win and keep playing for myself, but for the guys that have not seen this part of baseball before.”
This Mariners team was the first to get to Yesavage in the big leagues, though. He was charged with five runs over four innings in Game 2, and while it didn’t look that bad in the moment, the Mariners took away Yesavage’s superpower: his splitter.
Against the Mariners, though, Yesavage drifted away from that splitter and leaned more heavily on his slider, which he felt was working well for him that day. This led to just two whiffs on six swings against his splitter. Sure, he threw it far less, but when you hold these two starts up side by side, it’s easy to see which version of Yesavage is better.
The 22-year-old’s slider is nasty, but his splitter is from another planet.
“I think there’s definitely going to be an adjustment. What that is, I’ll keep with us,” John Schneider said. “You know what I mean? But I think that’s the cat-and-mouse game of a seven-game series when you’re facing a starter a couple times.”
Yesavage wanted to keep his cards close to his chest, too. In the middle of May, you might get a pitcher to open up about how they’re approaching an opposing lineup, but in October, good luck getting them to tell you what they ate for breakfast that day.
“It’s just about watching other pitchers go at it and how they attack the hitters and where success is found and where success is not found,” Yesavage said.
In an unexpected way, Yesavage’s Game 2 stumble may have set him up well for this must-win game back in Toronto. If the Mariners had already seen Yesavage’s splitter looking like it did against the Yankees, then we’d be having a conversation about whether he needs to pivot away from it. Instead, it feels like Yesavage just needs to get back to his strength. He needs to get back to the splitter.
The beauty of a splitter is that, when it’s thrown well, sometimes it doesn’t matter if the hitter knows it’s coming. Just look at Gausman, another right-hander who leans so heavily on fastballs high and splitters low. Like Yesavage, he mixes in a slider, but the fastball and splitter are the co-stars of the show. One pitch teases the other, forcing hitters to guess. That ALDS game against the Yankees? That’s what it looks like when hitters guess wrong.
This is Yesavage’s introduction to the adjustment game at the MLB level. Development is done. It’s October now and the entire Mariners organization has 48 hours to figure out how to beat him.
Can the 22-year-old stay one adjustment ahead? If he doesn’t, the Blue Jays’ season might come crashing down around them. If he does, he’ll be a hero in this city. No pressure, right?
