A year and a half ago, Trey Yesavage was in college. Six months ago, he was in A ball. On Wednesday, he was at Dodger Stadium, pitching the Toronto Blue Jays to within one win of a World Series championship.
In a Game 5 start that evoked memories of baseball legends, the 22-year-old Blue Jays rookie defanged the Los Angeles Dodgers. He beat them with sliders they couldn’t hit and splitters they didn’t even try to hit. Through seven masterful innings, Yesavage baffled a lineup of veterans, All-Stars and MVPs, beating the Dodgers 6-1 and putting the Blue Jays on the verge of their first World Series title since 1993.
Game 6 is Friday night in Toronto, and if Blue Jays win it all, Yesavage will have been the final piece that made it possible.
Drafted last summer and called up in mid-September, Game 5 was only Yesavage’s eighth Major League start, and five of them have come in the playoffs. Throwing his slider twice as often as in his dominant postseason debut against the Yankees, Yesavage struck out 12, getting 14 swings-and-misses on his slider and eight called strikes on his split-finger. He allowed three hits and induced a total of 23 swings-and-misses.
Yesavage became the first rookie since Don Newcombe to reach double-digit strikeouts in a World Series game, and the first pitcher since Sandy Koufax with at least 10 strikeouts in the first five innings of a World Series game. He broke Smoky Joe Wood’s record for the most World Series strikeouts by a pitcher 22 or younger.
And Yesavage did it a month and a half after his big league debut.
He was up against a far more accomplished Dodgers starter in Blake Snell, a two-time Cy Young winner who came into this World Series as the hottest pitcher on the planet. Since Sept. 10 — in his last three starts of the regular season and his first three of the playoffs — Snell had pitched to a 0.68 ERA with 56 strikeouts in 40 innings.
But the Blue Jays have since beaten him twice in this series. They scored five runs off Snell in Game 1 and pounced on him immediately in Game 5.
Snell’s first pitch of the night was a fastball up in the zone, and Davis Schneider hit it 373 feet for a home run. Snell’s next two pitches were fastballs down and in, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit the second one 394 feet for another home run. It was the first time in World Series history that a team started a game with back-to-back homers, and the Blue Jays did it on three pitches.
Dodgers right fielder Teoscar Hernández misplayed a fourth-inning fly ball into a leadoff triple, which wound up costing Snell another run, and the Blue Jays added two more — off the Dodgers bullpen but charged to Snell — in the top of the seventh.
Yesavage returned to the mound for the bottom of the seventh and punctuated his masterpiece with one last strikeout and a double play. As Guerrero caught the final out of the inning, he roared toward the heavens while Yesavage strutted off the field, a rookie who just carved his name into World Series history and is one win away from having a World Series ring.
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