A Tale of Two Adjustments: Blue Jays Seize 3-2 World Series Advantage

Game 5 of the World Series was a rematch between two pitchers, Blake Snell and Trey Yesavage, who each left Game 1 of the series unhappy with their form. That game devolved into a bullpen battle, and surely neither starter wanted a repeat of that. With the series tied at two, whichever pitcher bounced back better was likely to send their team to Toronto with a 3-2 lead and the inside track on the title. Both starters went deep into the game, but in the end, the Blue Jays got the best of Snell. They snuck in a few runs early, broke through late, and held the Dodgers at bay en route to a 6-1 victory that put them a win away from their third championship in franchise history.

For the first three rounds of the playoffs, Snell went directly at hitters, overwhelming them in the strike zone and pitching deep into games as a result. He tried a new strategy to begin the World Series, though. The Blue Jays present a maddening problem to opposing pitchers. They look for pitches to drive early in the count, and they take big, extra-base-seeking swings when they can. They’re also frustratingly patient outside of the strike zone. In Game 1, Snell tried to work the edges of the zone early, only to pay the price in baserunners and pitches. He limited the damage for a while, but wore himself out and gave Toronto far too many free baserunners in the process.

On Wednesday, he had a new plan. A direct approach had served Snell well all month. Going away from it did him no favors. He’d been so afraid of Toronto’s power that he dinked and dunked himself out of the game. No more of that. Snell’s first pitch of the game was a fastball, belt high to Davis Schneider. It was a statement pitch. Schneider turned it into an exclamation point, tucking it 373 feet over the wall in left.

Ah, well then. Nevertheless, Snell persisted. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. up? No matter; Snell’s second pitch was another fastball in the strike zone, lower third and inside. Guerrero took it. Snell’s third pitch was another fastball in the strike zone, middle-in. Guerrero took a mighty hack and demolished it, deep into the Los Angeles night. Three pitches, two home runs. Maybe the plan from Game 1 wasn’t so bad after all.

The good news for the Dodgers is that Snell won two Cy Youngs with the game plan he brought to his earlier World Series start. He regrouped with a heaping helping of curveballs, changeups, and sliders, aimed mostly at the edges of the strike zone, to stem the tide. Some of the counts went deep – seven at-bats in the first four innings went five pitches or more, a huge number for the quick-strike Jays – but Snell stuck with it. He tucked his fastball into his back pocket, using it as his fourth pitch, and patiently wore Toronto down, pitch count be damned. His only blemish through six innings (after those two homers, of course) came when Teoscar Hernández misplayed a Daulton Varsho fly ball into a triple to lead off the fourth; he scored on an Ernie Clement sacrifice fly.

Snell’s counterpart came into the game with similar hopes of reclaiming his early-October form. Yesavage’s meteoric ascent through four levels of the minor leagues hit its first real bump in his World Series debut; he abandoned his normally-trusty splitter, and he labored mightily en route to an early exit. His solution was simpler than Snell’s: Get back to throwing the splitter, but this time have better feel for it. Right on cue, Yesavage threw two splits en route to retiring Shohei Ohtani to lead off the bottom of the first.

Game on, then: Yesavage attacked the Dodgers lineup with his customary head-on mindset. He briefly became an avatar of true outcomes; he peeled off five strikeouts in a row, then served up a mammoth home run to Enrique Hernández in the third. But homer or not, Yesavage’s stuff was absolutely humming in Game 5. He struck out Ohtani, Will Smith, and Mookie Betts in succession to push his tally to eight. Another two – Enrique and Alex Call – put Yesavage into the double digits over the first five innings of the game.

This is, essentially, the ideal form of Yesavage. His unorthodox delivery and weirdo, backwards-movement slider keep hitters off balance. Fastballs explode down from his high release point. His splitter makes everything else play up, because hitters have to account for it and yet still usually come up empty. The Dodgers had no answers. If you’re wondering how a 2024 draftee could tear through the entirety of professional baseball, from A-ball in April to literally the Dodgers in the World Series, tonight was an illuminating example.

Through six innings, those two game-opening home runs were the only daylight between the two teams. Snell’s tightrope act was tiring but effective. Yesavage always seems like a threat to leave a cookie right over the middle, but with a two-run cushion and no command issues, he never encountered trouble. The Dodgers lineup is no doubt mighty, but it’s been sputtering recently, and had flatly no chance against Yesavage on Wednesday. Their best bet was to wait him out, have Snell and the bullpen hold the line, and attack the Toronto bullpen.

The plan fell apart right away, as multi-run comeback plans so often do. Snell extended past 100 pitches to get the lefties at the bottom of the Toronto lineup, but Addison Barger punched a single to left (his third time reaching base in the game), Andrés Giménez walked, and suddenly Snell was walking off the mound with Guerrero due up next. The Dodgers bullpen isn’t great at the best of times, and they’d covered a ludicrous 16.1 innings over the past two nights. Edgardo Henriquez got the nod in Game 5, and he didn’t have it. He never got comfortable, whipped a ball to the backstop to allow Barger to score (he advanced three times on wild pitches in the inning), and then let the other runner Snell had bequeathed him score when Bo Bichette laced a single to right.

Yesavage, too, ran out of gas in the seventh. His fastball was down two ticks. He kept overthrowing his splitter. The long layoff in the top half of the inning, and of course the career-high workload in general, seemed to weigh on him. There’s also the fact that he had never previously pitched into the seventh as a professional. But he dialed up a dastardly splitter to strike out Freddie Freeman, bringing him to an even dozen on the night. After an infield single, he induced an inning-ending double play from Tommy Edman, batting righty in a fruitless attempt to counter Yesavage’s splitter.

The two runs the Jays scored in that seventh inning turned the remainder of the game into a formality; they added another in the eighth. The Dodgers managed a few baserunners, but couldn’t even move a runner into scoring position, let alone cash in a run. They didn’t even get the luxury of facing a mop-up reliever; John Schneider never does anything halfway, and he used the high-leverage part of the bullpen to swathe tonight’s victory in bubble wrap.

At the end of the day, Snell didn’t have the tools to hold the Blue Jays down in this series. He tried coming right at them unsuccessfully, and he didn’t have any luck trying to outlast them either. With his sharpest stuff, on a day where his command was perfectly on point, I have no doubt that he could have managed it. But this Jays lineup is relentless, and they’re particularly well-suited to attack a lefty starter who relies on a changeup. It was a miserable matchup for him, and he just couldn’t overcome it.

Yesavage, on the other hand, continued his spectacular October. He has now recorded double-digit strikeout games against the two best offenses in baseball, with this game joining his earlier wipeout of the Yankees. It won’t always be so good. Teams will get more video on him, hitters will adapt to his deceptive release point. But who cares about the future? The present is here right now, and in it, Trey Yesavage just dominated the scariest lineup in the sport on the biggest stage there is to push his team towards a championship.