NEW YORK -- What if this is just who Trey Yesavage is now?
What if there’s no sophomore slump and no regression, only more of the same brilliance we saw in the Blue Jays’ 2025 World Series run? All offseason, it felt like a pipe dream, but look at him now.
Yesavage’s performance in Wednesday night’s 2-1 win over the Yankees was his best of the young season, giving the Blue Jays six scoreless innings with eight strikeouts and just two hits allowed. Five starts in, Yesavage owns a 1.07 ERA. This one against the Yankees was the very definition of what a confident starter looks like.
The two-hour rain delay? Yesavage didn’t seem to mind. He just “walked around,” watched his teammates play cards and sipped Red Bulls. Three of them, he guessed.
All of this came against Cam Schlittler on the other side, perhaps the best pitcher in the American League right now. What a treat it will be if they line up to face one another once or twice a season for the next five years.
“They’re going to be in the league for a while and they’re going to be great,” said Andrés Giménez. “As a competitor, that’s something you want to see. It happened tonight.”
Most exciting is that we’re seeing Yesavage win in different ways. Good pitchers can win their way; great pitchers can win every way.
We already know that Yesavage can miss bats. His splitter can turn any lineup inside out, racking up whiffs like few starters in baseball. This season, though, we’ve already seen him grind through outings with his “B” game, and Wednesday, we saw Yesavage setting himself up in great counts by hitting his spots instead of overwhelming hitters with pure “stuff.”
His first time up, Aaron Judge swung through a beautiful fastball from Yesavage, right at the top of the zone. We focus so much on how Yesavage’s high release point makes his tumbling splitter even more dangerous, but there’s also something to be said about a heater that starts high, stays high and creates that split second of hesitation. Next time up, Judge stared at strike three, then Yesavage got him swinging through a slider for Judge’s third K of the night.
“He’s a good player. I try to strike out everybody,” Yesavage said. “I guess it’s an accomplishment to strike him out three times, but I try to do that to everybody.”
There shouldn’t be any innings restrictions on Yesavage this season, either. A right shoulder impingement slowed him in Spring Training and delayed his 2026 debut by a month, and while those rehab starts still count, it seems like the brief layoff has taken Yesavage out of the danger zone in Year 2.
“The plan was to be a little bit cautious anyways, then leave ourselves some off-ramps, if you will,” manager John Schneider said. “That built itself in with the shoulder [injury]. It may have been similar to this point if he was a full go to start the season, and maybe that detour would have come in July, but the detour came in Spring Training.”
It’s fine-tuning time for Yesavage. This is where the “boring” parts of being a Major League starter can make all the difference, from how Yesavage handles his bullpen sessions to between starts to his training schedule, arm care routines and all of the quiet work we don’t see. These all get bundled together under the blanket term, “routines,” and when you have talent like Yesavage, all that’s left is to master those routines. That’s how you stick around and do this to the Yankees for the next decade.
It’s almost a downshift for Yesavage, who debuted in the midst of the Blue Jays’ division run late last season and starred in the AL Division Series, AL Championship Series and World Series. The adrenaline ride is over, at least for now, and reality has set back in.
“You’re in a different mode now,” Schneider said. “You’re starting your Major League starting career now and this is the first step. There are going to be some ups and downs and a lot of adjusting. You temper your expectations, but not try to sell anyone short.”
That’s where we’re suddenly at with Yesavage. So many pitching prospects have broken fans’ hearts over the years, so it’s natural, even after the early fireworks, to wonder how something might go wrong.
What if it doesn’t, though? What if Trey Yesavage just keeps doing this?