TORONTO -- Trey Yesavage just put up his first triple-double in the big leagues.
Three innings, three escapes with double plays. Yesavage came into his Game 6 start in the American League Championship Series on Sunday without forcing a double play in his big league career, and he’d forced just two hitters to ground into double plays over 98 innings in the Minors.
What timing to learn a new trick.
Yesavage struck out seven Mariners over his 5 2/3 innings, holding Seattle to two runs in Toronto’s 6-2 win, which forced a win-or-go-home Game 7 on Monday night at Rogers Centre. But this is the first Yesavage start we’ll remember for a play he was part of defensively.
“I just believed in myself. I know my stuff plays at this level,” Yesavage said. “I know the defense behind me is going to play at the best of their abilities, and getting three double plays in back-to-back-to-back innings was huge.”
Huge? They might have saved the Blue Jays’ season.
Yesavage pulled these double plays off to end the third, fourth and fifth innings, but the double play to end the third might have been the defining moment of the game, perfectly capturing the 2025 Blue Jays in one well-timed flurry.
With the bases loaded and Cal Raleigh at the plate, Yesavage was staring down the barrel of a worst-case scenario. Raleigh’s home run in Game 5 in Seattle on Sunday kickstarted the Mariners’ comeback and the Blue Jays’ implosion, and fresh off a 60-homer season, Raleigh could have flipped the game in an instant and ended Toronto’s season. Instead, he hit a ground ball to first base, and it all began.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. made the scoop moving toward second base and, while still running, fired a strike to Andrés Giménez. This might be Guerrero’s most underrated skill, his incredible ability to make throws from first base, especially to kickstart double plays. Giménez, the Blue Jays’ big offseason addition and big bet on more elite defense, made the perfect throw back to first, and it was Yesavage who’d scampered over just in time. From the face of the franchise to the defensive specialist to the rookie sensation, what a moment.
“I saw the ball was smoked over to Vladdy, so I knew I had to get my butt over there,” Yesavage said, already grinning at the memory. “And I had no idea where the bag was, so I just thank the Lord that he put me right on top of it, and that the throw was right on the target too.”
According to Elias, since 1940 only three other teams had hit into an inning-ending double play in three straight innings in a postseason game. Yesavage just forced the Mariners to sit at a table with the Padres in the 2005 NL Division Series, the Reds in the 1995 NLCS and the Mets in the 1973 World Series. All of this from a pitcher who’s known for everything but forcing ground balls.
With an elite defense like Toronto’s, though, allowing balls in play isn’t scary. It can actually be something that helps Yesavage, perhaps even help him to be more efficient and work deeper into games if he’s not leaning on strikeouts as Plan A and Plan B.
“[Pitchers] have talked about it openly. I think that they're not afraid to be in the zone,” manager John Schneider said. “Sometimes you get burned when you're in the zone, right? We have seen it this postseason, we have seen it this year. But I think that it's how we're built. It's allowed us to have comeback wins. Every guy that's on the mound trusts that. We’ve got four or five Gold Glove finalists.”
Yesavage had been handling business the old-fashioned way prior to that, striking out the side in the second inning. Unlike last time out against the Mariners in Game 2, he was leaning more heavily on his incredible splitter, which creates such a great sense of deception when it plays off his fastball. Yesavage got away from that the first time he faced Seattle, instead turning to his slider, but he was back to the best version of himself in the early innings.
Yesavage is already one of the best stories of the season for the Blue Jays, and performances like these are putting him in a small group of postseason stars in this organization’s history. If we’re still watching highlights of this run years from now, we’ll be seeing his first double play in the big leagues over and over again.