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By Jackson Roberts
Contributing Sports Writer
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Three months ago, Toronto Blue Jays starting pitcher Trey Yesavage was in the middle of his coming-out party. Now, we're debating whether he's a top-10 prospect in all of baseball.
Yesavage is hardly a "prospect" in terms of his notoriety. He debuted in the majors in September, but in October, he was the No. 2 starter on a Blue jays team that came up just short of a World Series, going 3-1 on the mound in the playoffs and striking out a gaudy 39 batters in 27 2/3 innings of work.
So suffice it to say that Yesavage could reasonably be insulted that ESPN's Kiley McDaniel placed him 14th on his Top 100 Prospects list on Tuesday, even ranking him behind the Pittsburgh Pirates' Bubba Chandler and the New York Mets' Nolan McLean, who also debuted at the end of last year.
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"I can already feel some pushback from readers that Yesavage, postseason hero, is behind two other rookies who haven't accomplished as much in the big leagues," McDaniel acknowledged. "When looking at the front-line starters in the majors, a lot of them are former pro prospects as position players (Yesavage wasn't) and almost all of the right-handed versions are breaking ball dominant.
"There's long been a scouting bias against right-handers whose changeups are well ahead of their breaking balls (see the Ryan Sloan blurb below for an interesting exception) as that makes it harder for the right-handed pitcher to have an out pitch against right-handed hitters."
Yesavage is incredibly unique, as he throws from the highest release point of any starter in the majors, and his extreme over-the-top motion explains why his splitter generates so much arm-side run, and why his slider has very little sweep action to it. Though McDaniel points out that there's not a history of that combo succeeding, the uniqueness of Yesavage could make him effective for a long time in this league.
It's not even necessarily McDaniel who is at fault here -- it's a system that strives to rank 23-year-old rising stars who have struck out Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge against 17-year-olds who have yet to leave the Dominican Republic, and everyone in between.
Based on what we've seen thus far from Yesavage, however, anyone would have a mighty difficult time telling Blue Jays fans that there are 13 current players with prospect status who will go on to have better careers than the young righty.
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