Blue Jays Batter the Bombers in Game 2, but Trey Yesavage Is the Bigger Story

The pitching matchup favored the Yankees. With all due respect to one of baseball’s best young arms, Toronto’s Trey Yesavage came into the contest having thrown just 14 big league innings. Conversely, New York starter Max Fried is a three-time All-Star who finished the season 19-5 with a 2.86 ERA. While Yesavage has a bright future — he’s currently the Blue Jays’ top prospect — his mound opponent seemed a better bet to perform under the pressure-packed lights of the postseason.

That didn’t happen. Yesavage, who began the year in Low-A and didn’t make his major league debut until September 15, not only kept the Yankees off the scoreboard, but he did so in spectacular fashion. As for Fried — ditto his teammates who followed him on the bump — it was a veritable horror show. He got rocked. When all was said and done, Toronto had bombarded the Bronx Bombers to the tune of a 13-7 rout that wasn’t as close as the final score suggested. The win gave the Blue Jays a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five Division Series.

That Canada’s team launched four home runs and took a 12-0 lead before the Yankees recorded their first hit — a sixth-inning single after Yesavage had left to a huge ovation — isn’t exactly a footnote to what transpired at Rogers Centre. It was an impressive onslaught. Even so, what the 22-year-old right-hander with the power arsenal did was the story of the day.

His dominance was on display from the get-go.

Yesavage fanned Trent Grisham to begin the game. Then, after walking Aaron Judge on four pitches, he basically went into rinse-and-repeat mode in the K department. Through four frames, the 20th-overall pick in last year’s draft had fanned 10 of the 13 batters he’d faced. The offerings he undressed hitters with were threefold. Per Baseball Savant, Yesavage threw 35 four-seamers, 29 splitters, and 14 sliders. The Yankees were powerless to square up the pitches that left his hand. Yesavage’s final line included 11 strikeouts and just one baserunner allowed over 5 1/3 frames.

The Toronto relievers didn’t find things quite so easy — far from it, actually — but more on that in a moment.

The Blue Jays batters began squaring up baseballs in the second inning. After Fried escaped a first-inning jam by inducing a double play, he surrendered the game’s first gopher in the second. Judge’s misplay on a Daulton Varsho double into the right field corner put a runner on third to start the inning, but the bobble was quickly rendered irrelevant. Ernie Clement followed with a home run to give the AL East champions a 2-0 lead.

From there it got ugly for Fried & Co. An Alejandro Kirk chopper to first with one out and runners on corners made it 3-0 in the third, and that was immediately followed by run-scoring knocks from Varsho, his second double of the game, and Clement. Then came the fourth inning, which left the Yankees shellshocked and the Toronto faithful in rapture. The oft-struggling New York bullpen took the brunt of the abuse. After an infield single and a walk, Fried was lifted for Will Warren, who walked George Springer to load the bases and struck out Davis Schneider looking for the first out. That’s when things got truly out of hand. In stepped Yankee killer Vladimir Guerrero Jr. With the count 2-1, Warren threw Guerrero a belt-high inside fastball. Vladito turned on it and absolutely demolished it 415 feet into the second deck in left-center field for a grand slam. Kirk singled on a grounder through the right side, and Varsho clobbered a two-run shot for his third extra-base hit of the game. In a hurry, there were 11 runs on the board.

The Blue Jays weren’t done. Springer went yard in the fifth, and after Cody Bellinger put the Yankees on the board with a two-run shot off of Justin Bruihl in the top of the sixth, Varsho played long ball again the bottom half. At 13-2, Toronto’s lead was nothing short of comfortable.

Until it wasn’t.

Unwilling to go quietly, the Yankees made a lot of loud contact in the seventh. Chewing through three Blue Jays relievers, New York plated five runs, making things at least temporarily uncomfortable for John Schneider’s club. At 13-7, the Yankees were down but not necessarily out.

Not long thereafter, though, they were done. Louis Varland tossed a scoreless eighth, and Seranthony Domínguez matched that zero in the ninth. Toronto’s overall bullpen effort wasn’t pretty — 10 hits and seven runs allowed in 3 2/3 innings — but the cushion the offense had provided was enough. The Blue Jays bats boomed throughout, belying the difficulty of facing a starter of Fried’s caliber in an important game.

The fresh-faced youngster that completely shut down a power-packed Yankees lineup? He was historically dominant. Per Sportsnet Canada, Yesavage became the first pitcher in major league history with 11 strikeouts while allowing no hits through the first five innings of a playoff game. His efforts put the Yankees, who entered this series having won 13 of their last 15 games, on the brink of elimination.

After a travel day on Monday, Game 3 of the ALDS is on tap for Tuesday night in the Bronx, where the Yankees will look to repeat what they did in 2017, the last time they fell behind 2-0 in a best-of-five series. That year, they lost the first two games on the road against Cleveland, who like these Blue Jays had won the most games in the American League. New York won two games to even the series and flip the momentum before winning the decisive Game 5 back on the road. To come all the way back this time, the Yankees will first need Carlos Rodón to silence the scorching hot Toronto lineup, and they’ll also need to score some runs against Blue Jays starter Shane Bieber.

Of course, that was also the Yankees’ plan when they arrived at Rogers Centre on Sunday, before they realized they were no match for Trey Yesavage.