The unique rookie pitcher taking the postseason stage vs. Yankees today

Trey Yesavage has made all of three Major League starts, but he's the one getting the ball for the Blue Jays in Game 2 of the American League Division Series. And he's one of the most interesting pitchers you'll see in these playoffs.

The 22-year-old rookie right-hander will take center stage in Toronto on Sunday, with the chance to give the Blue Jays a commanding 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series. The Blue Jays will look to Yesavage to be their version of the Yankees' own electric rookie, Cam Schlittler, who just dismantled the Red Sox in the Wild Card Series.

As a pitcher, though, Yesavage isn't much like Schlittler, who just rips fastballs by you. Really, he's not much like most pitchers.

Yesavage has a combination of outlier qualities that make him unique. Here's why you'll want to watch him when he takes the mound this postseason.

He's kind of like Jonah Tong, but he's not exactly like Jonah Tong

Yesavage is one of the most true over-the-top throwers in the Majors. His arm angle, as measured by Statcast, is 63 degrees, which is extremely high. (Zero degrees would be perfectly sidearm, and 90 degrees would be perfectly over-the-top, although no pitcher actually gets to that point.)

The Yankees won't see another starter who throws like Yesavage. Look how different he is than his fellow Blue Jays, for example.

The only starting pitcher this season with a higher arm angle than Yesavage was Tong -- the Mets' own star pitching prospect -- by a single degree.

Most over-the-top arm angle, SP, 2025
Min. 200 total pitches

1. Jonah Tong: 64 degrees
2. Trey Yesavage: 63 degrees
3. Bradley Blalock: 62 degrees
4-T. Tobias Myers: 61 degrees
4-T. Mitchell Parker: 61 degrees

But Yesavage's over-the-top arm angle doesn't really look like Tong's over-the-top arm angle, because the way they throw the ball is completely different. Tong's delivery looks like Tim Lincecum 2.0. Yesavage doesn't have any of that body contortion.

The 6-foot-4, 225-pound righty simply rears back and fires straight downhill. That's why Blue Jays coaches like to say that Yesavage's splitter, his signature pitch, comes "from the sky."

Yesavage releases his splitter, which produced a 57% swing-and-miss rate and 50% strikeout rate in the regular season, from the highest arm slot of any of his pitch types -- 65 degrees, compared to 63 on his fastball and 62 on his slider.

If you want to get a sense of what "a splitter that comes from the sky" looks like, here's how Yesavage's splitter arm slot compares to other MLB offspeed pitch types in 2025:

From the sky, indeed.

He's kind of like Justin Verlander, but he's not exactly like Justin Verlander

If you want an over-the-top starting pitcher comparison for Yesavage, the better one is Justin Verlander, not Tong.

Why? Because Yesavage doesn't just have an extreme over-the-top arm angle, he also has an extremely high release point. That's a big part of his pitches "from the sky," too.

In that sense, Yesavage pitches in the mold of Verlander, a classic over-the-top power pitcher who still has the highest vertical release point of any starter … but by only a fraction of an inch over Yesavage.

Highest release points, SP, 2025
Min. 200 total pitches

1. Justin Verlander: 7.10 feet
2. Trey Yesavage: 7.09 feet
3. Tyler Wells: 7.02 feet
4. Nick Pivetta: 6.78 feet
5. Austin Gomber: 6.61 feet

Yesavage gets to that release point with an even higher arm angle than Verlander (55 degrees). His high release and true over-the-top delivery create a ton of rise on his fastball. And the rising fastball is, of course, the pitch Verlander is famous for.

Yesavage's four-seamer rises about an inch more than Verlander's these days. But they're the same style of fastball.

Yesavage generates 19.5 inches of induced vertical break on his fastball. That's how much it "rises" based the way he releases and spins the baseball, removing the effects of gravity, which naturally drags all pitches down. Verlander was at 18.6 inches of induced rise in 2025.

More "rise" means the pitch drops less than the hitter expects, making them more likely to swing and miss, particularly up in the zone. And Yesavage has a top-five rising fastball among starting pitchers.

Most induced "rise" on four-seamers, SP, 2025
Min. 100 four-seamers thrown

1-T. Jonah Tong: 19.8 inches
1-T. Connor Gillispie: 19.8 inches
3. Nick Pivetta: 19.7 inches
4-T. Trey Yesavage: 19.5 inches
4-T. Tobias Myers: 19.5 inches
4-T. Tyler Anderson: 19.5 inches

Yesavage's fastball might profile like Verlander's, but the way he uses it is different. Yesavage wants his rising heater to set up his wipeout splitter for the K. The four-seamer comes from the sky and stays in the sky; the splitter comes from the sky and plummets to earth.

For Yesavage, the splitter is his No. 1 strikeout pitch by far. For Verlander at his peak, the rising fastball is what he used most to blow hitters away, and then he spun his slider and curve off of it.

He's kind of like Kevin Gausman, but he's not exactly like Kevin Gausman

If you look at Yesavage's pitch arsenal -- four-seamer, splitter, slider -- and the way he dominates with the split, you might think you're seeing double in Toronto between him and Blue Jays ace Kevin Gausman.

Gausman's pitch types are the same. And he's one of baseball's preeminent splitter strikeout artists.

A full season of Yesavage, ideally, would mirror a full season of Gausman at his most dominant.

So is Yesavage just the new Gausman? Not exactly. He has the same pitches, but they're different versions of those pitches.

From a pitch movement perspective, the standout quality of Gausman's fastball and splitter is how much horizontal movement they get. Take his best season with the Blue Jays, for example -- 2023, when he struck out 109 batters on four-seamers and 127 on splitters. That season, Gausman's fastball averaged 10.6 inches of arm-side run, over three inches more than the average big league right-handed pitcher. His splitter averaged 16.3 inches of run, over five inches more than average.

Yesavage's stuff stays a lot more true. He comes straight at the hitter with his fastball-splitter combo, whereas Gausman's pitches fade away by five-plus inches more.

Gausman and Yesavage's arm angles are 25 degrees different -- Gausman throws out of a three-quarters slot at 38 degrees, much lower than Yesavage's 63 degrees over-the-top delivery. That creates the big divergence in their movement profiles.

Facing Yesavage and facing Gausman are two different looks, even though their pitch types and their styles resemble each other.

He's kind of like Dauri Moreta, but he's not exactly like Dauri Moreta

We've been focusing a lot on Yesavage's fastball and splitter, since that's his chief pitch combo, but we've actually saved the weirdest thing about him for last: his slider.

Yesavage's slider breaks the wrong way.

Almost every breaking pitch in the world breaks to the pitcher's glove side. That goes for basically all the curveballs, sliders, sweepers and slurves you see pitchers spinning around Major League Baseball.

But not Yesavage's slider. Yesavage's slider breaks to his arm side -- for him, that means left to right. In a way, that makes it more like a screwball than a slider. And it's the opposite direction that a hitter would expect his slider to move.

Backwards slider movement is the oddity that put Moreta on the map with the Pirates a couple of years ago. But Yesavage's slider moves even more to the arm side than Moreta's does. It has more arm-side movement of any breaking pitch in the Majors.

Breaking pitches with most arm-side movement direction, 2025
Min. 50 thrown

1. Trey Yesavage's slider: 3.4 inches
2. Chase Perry's slider: 2.8 inches
3. Dauri Moreta's slider: 2.7 inches
4. Brock Burke's slider: 1.1 inches
5-T. Elvis Alvarado's slider: 0.9 inches
5-T. Corbin Martin's curveball: 0.9 inches

Yesavage's slider moving the way it does has to create extra deception for batters who are used to every slider they face moving in the opposite direction.

That slider, coupled with Yesavage's four-seamer and splitter, creates a pretty unique overall pitch profile. He throws three pitches in three different pitch groups: one fastball (his four-seamer), one breaking ball (his slider) and one offspeed pitch (his splitter). But they all reside in the same quadrant of pitch movement:

Is it a winning profile in the postseason? We'll see. But it's a profile hitters don't see, and that makes Yesavage a pitcher worth tuning in for.