The Blue Jays Don't Deserve Trey Yesavage

[Matthew Creally]

Even after a two-hour rain delay, there was a sense of predictability around the third game of the Blue Jays-Yankees series last Wednesday night in the Bronx. Cam Schlittler, the MLB leader in ERA and FIP among qualified pitchers, was set to take the hill against a Toronto offense that had slashed a cringeworthy .243/.306/.369 as a unit so far in the month of May. The Jays also left the tying run on third base in each of the first two games of the series. What happened against Schlittler and the Yankees was unsurprising, as they only scored two runs and managed just one extra-base hit.

Thanks to Trey Yesavage, it didn't matter.

The 22-year-old, in his first start at Yankee Stadium, outdueled Schlittler, going six shutout innings, striking out eight, walking none, and allowing just two hits on 95 pitches. The Blue Jays won 2-1. Yesavage's season started a month late as he recovered from an impingement in his throwing shoulder, but through five starts, his ERA is a sparkling 1.07. He was forecasted by most publicly available projection systems to have an ERA in the mid-to-high 3.00s, which would be perfectly acceptable for a rookie his age but also an indication that the pitcher who set the world on fire last October wouldn't sustain that pace. So far, he has.

Rain delays can often throw a wrench into a team's pitching plans. Starters need to follow particular routines and time themselves up to be ready for the first pitch, but when that comes two hours later than expected, it can sometimes put unforeseen limits on their availability that evening. The big story on Wednesday was not only Yesavage's 95 pitches, the second-most he has ever thrown in a major league outing after Game 5 of the World Series, but that his velocity was way up. His fastball sat 95.2 mph, the second-hardest single-game average of his young career, and his slider and splitter were also more than 1.0 mph higher than their season averages. Perhaps he has three cans of Red Bull to thank for that.

Until last night, Yesavage had more postseason strikeouts than regular season strikeouts to his name. While his ability to miss bats was on full display against the Yankees, his strikeout rate has slightly fallen back down to earth in 2026. Again, this isn't a cause for concern – it's still in the high 20s, and he was never going to repeat his 35.8% postseason K rate over 20-25 starts. The thing he has done extremely well this year, though, is limit quality contact. Pitchers don't exert much control over how hard opponents hit the ball, but location and launch angle are highly correlated, and Yesavage is hitting the right spots to induce sub-optimal batted ball angles.

Trey Yesavage Batted Ball Metrics, 2025 vs 2026

Year	GB%	PU%	Pull Fly Ball%	Barrel%	BIP% < -3° LA + BIP% > 38° LA
2025	56.4%	0.0%	2.6%	7.7%	43.6%
2026	34.9%	14.3%	1.6%	3.2%	54.0%

I like looking at the percentage of batted balls outside that -3° to 38° launch angle range. Not all grounders and fly balls are created equally, and hits outside of that boundary resulted in an average wOBA of less than .300 from 2023 to 2025. It's essentially an adjusted sum of groundball rate and popup rate that only shows the least threatening batted balls possible. Over half of the balls in play that Yesavage has induced this year fall into that category. No one's barreling anything or pulling any fly balls. It's hard to do damage without checking at least one of those boxes.

The drop in groundball rate is quite fascinating, but he's compensating for it by running one of the highest popup rates in the league. Splitting his groundballs up by pitch type, there isn't a considerable decrease this year with the splitter or slider: It's mostly happening on the fastball, and it appears to be a direct byproduct of a change in location. Yesavage's fastball averages over 20" of induced vertical break (IVB) thanks to his high release point, so it defies gravity and gives the illusion that it's rising more than almost every four-seamer in the game, meaning hitters are bound to swing under it. In 2026, he's throwing a lot more fastballs down in the zone.

Trey Yesavage Fastball Location, 2025 vs 2026

Top left: LHB 2025; top right: RHB 2025; bottom left: LHB 2026; bottom right: RHB 2026

Normally, fastballs with high IVB are more effective when they're elevated because if pitchers aim for a low strike, they run the risk of generating carry upward into the middle of the zone, making them more prone to damage. However, it's working for Yesavage, and I think this is partially a result of hitters being wary of the splitter, which requires steep, uppercut swings to counteract its downward movement. Pitcher List's Anthony Licciardi recently profiled Kevin Gausman's longevity and found that Gausman has sustained success despite also consistently locating his fastball down in the zone. Maybe fastball-splitter pitchers can get away with this kind of approach because hitters on both sides of the plate always have to respect the possibility of seeing a splitter?

Fundamentally, not much has changed about Yesavage since he first donned a Blue Jays uniform in September of last year. The sky-high release point is still there. The fastball still carries, and it hasn't lost any velocity since his shoulder injury. The splitter still has plenty of vertical separation from the fastball and induces ugly swings from lefties. The slider still moves the wrong way. His stuff is still electric, he's still missing bats, and now he's becoming a weak contact pitcher too. His development over the past calendar year has become even more remarkable than it already was.

The only considerable change we've seen to his profile this year is a decrease in slider usage. He's throwing way more fastballs to righties and more splitters to lefties, with the slider taking a tertiary role to both sides of the plate. As a result, his strikeout rate against righties has nearly doubled compared to last regular season. However, none of this stopped him from reintroducing the slider on Wednesday night. He threw it 27% of the time to Yankee hitters, a single-game high on the young season, and the fact that they chased 70% of the sliders they saw out of the zone suggests they weren't ready for it at all.

Trey Yesavage Pitch Usage by Handedness, 2025 vs 2026

Pitch Type	2025 vs LHB	2026 vs LHB	2025 vs RHB	2026 vs RHB
FF	50%	44%	39%	51%
FS	34%	46%	16%	22%
SL	16%	10%	45%	27%

As much as I'd rather not pour some cold water on a guy who has been nothing but dominant since he came to the big leagues, especially considering how difficult it is to put a positive spin on the Jays' season right now, there are some things about the way Yesavage's first eight regular season starts have unfolded that seem impossible to continue. He has yet to surrender a non-playoff home run in his career, having induced 27 fly balls that have all stayed in the yard. If he keeps generating this many popups and prevents opponents from getting the barrel to the ball or pulling anything in the air, I don't doubt he'll maintain a low HR/FB% in the long run, but the postseason proved that it's possible to take him deep from time to time.

I also don't know how I feel about his command at the moment. On one hand, his walk rate is down from last year, sitting at 7.9% after Wednesday night. On the other, the zone rate on his splitter is down almost 10 points to 34.5%, and command grades from both pitch quality models hosted on FanGraphs suggest the precision of his fastball and his splitter have waned slightly compared to 2025. The splitter is always going to be a chase pitch for him, but pitchers walk a fine line when zone rates on a given offering sink below 35% and they become overly reliant on poor discipline (remember what happened when people stopped swinging against Brendon Little?). Against lefties, his walk rate is only 3.4%, which is probably going to go up if the pitch that he throws 46% of the time against them is out of the zone this much.

It can be puzzling when a pitcher's walk rate decreases despite throwing fewer pitches in the zone. It's hard to picture Yesavage's walk rate staying this far below 10% for much longer, but even when he battled his control last year, he got enough strikeouts to make it work, and his stuff is still good enough that it seems like a sustainable combination in the long term.

In the 2025 postseason, Yesavage didn't have to steal games for the Blue Jays because of how many runs they scored. This year, the current state of the offense probably means he'll have to pitch in way tighter contests, and early indications suggest he's up to the task. He almost single-handedly won Wednesday night's game for them, and since his MLB debut, his 2.05 FIP leads all starting pitchers with at least 30 innings. He might not pitch like a Cy Young candidate indefinitely, but there's no denying that he has quickly established himself as one of the better starting pitchers in the game.

All stats entering May 21, 2026.

View full article