Yesavage to open season on IL with shoulder impingement

DUNEDIN -- The hits just keep on coming to the Blue Jays’ rotation. Trey Yesavage, the breakout star of 2025 and an early favorite for the ‘26 AL Rookie of the Year Award, will begin the season on the IL.

Yesavage is dealing with a right shoulder impingement, manager John Schneider announced Thursday morning, and while they won’t shut Yesavage down completely from throwing, he won’t be ready by the time games count.

Coming off a spike in workload last season, when Yesavage opened in Single-A Dunedin and ended up in Game 7 of the World Series, the Blue Jays had been intentionally cautious with Yesavage this spring. That plan made sense on a fundamental level, prioritizing Yesavage being fresh next October, not just in April. Now, we finally have the rest of the picture.

“It’s something that he reported to camp with and it obviously led to his slow build-up, as well,” Schneider said. “Right now, he’s feeling good and he’s in a better place now to continue to ramp up. He’s going to continue on the program he’s been on.”

The good news here is that Yesavage will continue to throw and is next scheduled to pitch on March 25. This doesn’t feel like Yesavage’s season being delayed by just a start or two, though. Yesavage last pitched on Monday in a Minor League game, where he threw 35 pitches over two innings, and he hadn’t progressed to pitching in Grapefruit League games yet this spring.

“It’s finding the sweet spot of not just building in the volume right away, but making sure he’s checking all of those boxes, too,” Schneider said. “Whether the next one on the 25th is a similar number of pitches or a bit more, we’ll see.”

Even if Yesavage’s shoulder responds perfectly and his velocities jump right back to where they need to be next week in Dunedin, it would still be a matter of building up over his next handful of outings. Does Toronto need him at 80-plus pitches to debut this season, or would 65 be enough?

Yesavage’s actual performance will be part of this conversation once we get beyond health and workloads. Shoulder issues can be complicated, and while the Blue Jays are optimistic that Yesavage is now past this issue, they’ll need to see his stuff 100% of the way back to proceed.

“A lot of guys deal with this,” Schneider said. “When he reported this, we slow-played it a little bit and I think it will just come back naturally. What he’s doing now checks those boxes. If we didn’t feel comfortable with him being on the mound and getting after it, then we wouldn’t do it.”

This Yesavage news lands on a rotation that is already without Shane Bieber, who hasn’t thrown off a mound yet this spring as he ramps up slowly from some forearm fatigue over the winter, and José Berríos, who just learned he has a stress fracture in his right elbow. What once looked like an extreme excess of rotation depth has now figured itself out, as baseball has a way of doing, but the Blue Jays are no longer in position to handle another day of bad news.

Eric Lauer is now very likely to join Toronto's rotation behind Kevin Gausman, Dylan Cease, Max Scherzer and Cody Ponce. The returns of Yesavage, Bieber and Berríos could come in waves through the early months of the season, which will bring new decisions each time.

Few young pitchers in baseball have upside like Yesavage, though. He’s a throwback, a bulldog on the mound with a splitter that was turning the best hitters in baseball inside out, and the Blue Jays need that upside if they’re going to chase the World Series.

“He wants to be out there, so he’s disappointed a little bit, but he understands where he was at,” Schneider said. “If he was feeling great, there would be a couple of different ways we could handle it, but we’ve been in touch with him and he’s been in touch with us. He’s handled this like a pro and he’s itching to get ramped up now that he’s back to feeling better.”

With Yesavage, much like Bieber and Berríos: stay tuned. The Blue Jays have weathered the storm well, but at this point, they need some good news to come along.