The Blue Jays are promoting right-hander Trey Yesavage to the majors, according to a report from Shi Davidi and Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet. Yesavage is expected to be active on the MLB roster for Monday’s game against the Rays in Tampa.
Yesavage, 22, was selected 20th overall in last year’s draft by Toronto. Viewed by most draft prospect evaluation services as a top-15 talent in his class at the time, he earned some top-100 prospect consideration this past offseason despite not having made his MLB debut yet thanks to a dominant 40.4% strikeout rate a 2.03 ERA in 15 starts for East Carolina last year. Yesavage began his season at the Single-A level and was promoted three separate times throughout the year. He made just four starts for High-A Vancouver before he was promoted to Double-A, and despite a 4.50 ERA in 30 innings at that level 38.0% strikeout rate was enough to convince Blue Jays brass to promote him to Triple-A last month.
Since then, he’s pitched to a 3.63 ERA in 17 1/3 innings of work while striking out 36.1% of his opponents. That’s an impressive enough figure that the Blue Jays decided to scratch Yesavage from his scheduled start with Buffalo tomorrow and call him up to the majors, though it shouldn’t be taken to mean Yesavage is completely without flaws. The youngster has walked 10.5% of his opponents this year, including 15.3% of his opponents at Triple-A. Those struggles with his command have generally been made up for by his impressive stuff, headlined by a fastball that sits 94-95 to go along with a splitter and a slider.
While the Blue Jays are still hard at work fending off the Yankees (who sit just three games back of Toronto in the AL East), they’re more or less assured of a spot in the postseason at this point. The club has a veteran rotation featuring Kevin Gausman, Max Scherzer, Shane Bieber, Chris Bassitt, and Jose Berrios as things stand. Yesavage is very unlikely to bump anyone from that group from the postseason rotation. It’s at least plausible the Jays could use Yesavage in spot starts over the season’s final weeks to help them line up their ideal postseason rotation for a potential Wild Card series, but the Jays have a real shot at a bye through the Wild Card round and would most likely benefit from seeing what Yesavage can do out of the bullpen.
Toronto’s bullpen has been flagging in recent weeks. Closer Jeff Hoffman has an ERA near 5.00, and deadline acquisition Louis Varland hasn’t taken to Canada very well despite his success in Minnesota earlier this year. With the late innings looking like a major question mark for the Jays headed into the postseason, trying Yesavage out of the bullpen and seeing if he can use his impressive stuff to dominate major league hitters in short bursts could result in the Jays having another power arm for their relief corps to lean on in October if the experiment goes well.
All that talk of October may sound confusing, given that the league’s rules state that a player may not be on a club’s postseason roster if not on the 40-man roster come September 1. There are ways around that, however, and one such loophole that would allow Yesavage to make a postseason roster this year is that clubs are allowed to replace players who are eligible to be activated off the injured list but not yet healthy enough to return, so long as the replacement was active in the organization prior to September 1. Yesavage meets those conditions, and the Jays have plenty of players who he could be considered a replacement for, such as Yimi Garcia.
Yesavage’s September call-up means that he’ll get at least a bit of major league service time this year, but we’ve long past the time where he would be in danger of losing rookie eligibility for the 2026 campaign. Toronto will need to create space on their 40-man roster in order to officially call Yesavage up to the majors on Monday by designating someone for assignment.
