“I Really Think This Is Just the Beginning”: Brody Brecht and Trey Yesavage on Climbing Into the First Round

Last season, the college baseball game of the year was the national semifinal matchup between LSU and Wake Forest. It pitted the first two pitchers chosen in that year’s draft — Paul Skenes and Rhett Lowder — against one another, with a berth in the College World Series final on the line. The two star right-handers obliged, combining to strike out 15 while allowing just eight baserunners over 15 scoreless innings. The game remained tied, 0-0, until the very final at-bat, when Tommy White hit a two-run walk-off home run to win it for LSU.

The closest thing we had to that kind of pitching matchup in 2024 came in the losers’ bracket of the Greenville Regional. The top four college starters in this year’s draft — Wake Forest’s Chase Burns, Arkansas’ Hagen Smith, East Carolina’s Trey Yesavage, and Iowa’s Brody Brecht — all played in different conferences. The only time any of those four faced each other was in a win-or-go-home matchup between ECU and Wake on the second day of the NCAA Tournament, and the contours of this game were somewhat different as well.

The game was decided in the ninth inning, after Yesavage and Burns had exited. ECU blew a 4-1 lead in the top of the frame, and Wake responded by coughing up three runs in the bottom of the ninth to lose, again, in walk-off fashion. (I genuinely have never seen a ninth inning quite like this one before or since, especially in a game with such high stakes.)

It took the two teams a combined 13 pitchers to record the final 11 outs of the game, and Yesavage said watching the final inning from the dugout was nerve-racking. But it was an important win, not only because it extended ECU’s season another game, but because the Pirates were able to get one over on an in-state rival.

“I like to think that North Carolina is probably the biggest rivalry state for baseball, but we never play Wake because of scheduling conflicts,” Yesavage told me at last month’s MLB Draft Combine. (I suggested that perhaps Wake had been ducking ECU in nonconference play, but Yesavage didn’t take the bait.) “But being able to play them and come out victorious and prove that, sure, we are a mid-major but we can hang with these Power Five schools, it’s special.”

Until that absurd ninth inning, Yesavage had been the big story of the game. The junior righty from Pennsylvania threw 112 pitches over 7 1/3 innings, striking out six, walking four, and allowing a single hit and only one run. Burns, on the other hand, got touched up for four runs in the fifth and had — in terms of innings pitched and runs scored — his worst outing of the season. Unlike the Skenes-Lowder duel, this time there had been a clear winner: Yesavage.

“I knew it was going to be a big deal, two of the top three pitchers in this year’s draft going at it, and I knew that I had to play my best to help our team have the best success to win, and I did play what I considered my best, especially after the collapsed lung,” Yesavage said. “But our team was able to give me some run support…”

Hang on, hang on, hang on. A collapsed lung?

Yeah, a week before the NCAA Tournament, Yesavage missed his conference tournament start because, while undergoing dry needling treatment, he got poked so deep the needle punctured his lung. That required a marathon car relay to get him home from Florida, where the accident took place.

“I rode back with my roommate’s parents, and then my other roommate’s girlfriend from Raleigh to Greenville,” Yesavage said. “But it feels good, I’m all good now.”

And a week later, Yesavage was back on the mound, outpitching, arguably, the no. 1 arm on the draft board. The latest version of The Board, out this week, has Smith no. 4 and Burns no. 5, with identical 50 FV grades, but they make up a clear first tier of college arms. (Eric Longenhagen prefers Smith, but I like Burns, because I’m a caveman who can’t get over Burns’ combination of triple-digit heat, plus-plus slider, and WWE-level showmanship. If the Rockies take him at no. 3 and ruin him, my response will be positively unprofessional.)

But Yesavage showed in his final start that he can hang with the biggest names on the board. The ECU righty, along with Brecht, makes up the second tier of college starters, likely to go off the board starting in the teens.

Yesavage and Brecht are big, prototypical righties with power stuff. Yesavage is 6-foot-4 with a fastball that sits up to 94 with a mid-80s slider that he varies shape and velocity on, along with a splitter and a spike curve he breaks out against lefties.

“It started off as a cutter, being taught the cutter grip, and it moved more than a traditional cutter,” Yesavage said of his slider, his best secondary pitch. “Over time, it became more of a traditional slider, but that’s something my pitching coach worked with me on. Getting moved from the bullpen to a starting role, I needed more pitches, so I developed the splitter and slider in that time.”

Trey Yesavage is the type of guy that can carry a team to Omaha. Straight filth. pic.twitter.com/ntz38JR7pL

— 11Point7 College Baseball (@11point7) April 27, 2024

Yesavage’s arm angle is about as close to vertical as you’re likely to see; that, along with his height, gives him a vertical release point that will be among the highest in professional baseball the moment he gets drafted. That gives his fastball a downward vertical plane that’s not exactly fashionable these days, but in Yesavage’s defense, he’s been throwing this way for a long time.

“My dad was the one that taught me how to throw, back in little league and tee-ball, but I never made an adjustment,” he said. “It’s always been comfortable for me. I don’t know if I’ve always thrown that high, it might’ve been a subtle progression over the years, but I didn’t work to get it that high — it just came natural.”

The big selling point for Yesavage this week is that he’s as close to big league-ready as any pitcher in the draft. In fact, he says he hopes to be the first pitcher from this class to make it to the majors. He’s in pretty good shape as far as reaching that goal; there’s very little physical projection left for him, and he already throws multiple breaking balls, plus a splitter. It’s a deep, starter-type repertoire.

But getting there has taken a lot of work. He’s had to break down and rework his leg kick and shorten up his arm action in order to throw strikes more consistently. At the same time, Yesavage was learning his knuckle-curve, which he said moved like crazy almost immediately but took a while for him to learn how to command.

The fact that it all clicked for Yesavage should be comforting for Brecht, who represents a higher-upside, but higher-risk alternative to teams looking for pitching in the middle of the first round.

Brecht is a big dude — we have him listed at 6-foot-4, 185 pounds, but he said he’d put on some 40 pounds during his college career (“Most of it pretty good weight,” according to Brecht) — and he looks it. As athletic and explosive as Burns is, Brecht might be even more so. He said that during his meetings with teams at the combine, the first thing they wanted to talk about was his football career, as Brecht had played receiver at Iowa before transitioning to baseball full-time.

For those of you who aren’t up on college football discourse, the Iowa teams Brecht played on were famously lights-out defensively but so inept with the ball they became a meme. When I said I didn’t know how to ask about Iowa’s offense without sounding impolite, Brecht put on a huge grin.

“Just let it rip, man. I’ve heard it all,” he said. So I repeated a joke from my college baseball preview: That Brecht, a future first-round pitcher who’d played for Brian Ferentz, must hate scoring more than any man alive. He gave that line a big laugh, I’m sure partly because I am, indeed, hilarious. But Brecht also just smiles and laughs easily. I’d gotten a heads-up from another reporter that Brecht had been the standout interview of the day, and the Iowa righty didn’t disappoint.

Brecht embraced the “What do you want to blow all your bonus money on?” question. At first, he expressed interest in a Lamborghini, then conceded that such a vehicle might be out of his price range until he hit free agency; he ultimately settled on a trip to Italy. (Yesavage, for his part, wants a new set of hunting clothes, which he assured me can run you four figures if you buy at the top of the range.)

But Brecht was also open about his struggles with his command, and how he believes he’s put those behind him.

The reason Brecht is a riskier prospect than Yesavage is not for lack of stuff. Eric, who isn’t prone to overstatement, put an 80 on Brecht’s slider, and also spoke favorably of Brecht’s changeup in his scouting report. These secondaries operate in concert with a fastball that — among potential first-day picks — only Burns comes close to matching for velocity. It’s not an ideal shape, but at 100 miles an hour with that breaking ball, well, they said the same thing about Skenes this time last year.

Brody Brecht did not allow an earned run through 7.2 IP yesterday. He showcased two different breaking balls, both with a Stuff+ over 200, including a sweeper that averaged 88 MPH with -14 HB. Brecht's 31 induced whiffs were the most by any pitcher recorded on Trackman this year pic.twitter.com/iqrBgKgszx

— Iowa Baseball Managers (@UIBASEManagers) April 22, 2024

So why aren’t we talking about this guy the way we talked about Skenes a year ago? Because for the overwhelming majority of his college career, Brecht could not find the strike zone with a compass, a map, and a pack of bloodhounds.

Brecht walked 25 batters in 22 2/3 innings as a freshman. The following year, he posted a highly confusing set of rate stats: a 3.74 ERA, but 4.3 H/9 and 7.1 BB/9. Even this year, he walked 5.6 batters per nine innings. Surely, I asked Brecht, an athlete like him could do better in terms of lining up his delivery and hitting the strike zone.

“I think it’s a mental thing,” he said. “The last five weeks of the year I started working with Brian King, who’s a mental performance coach, and I think my numbers the last five weeks of the year were some of the best in the country.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing; Brecht walked four in one inning of work in his final regular-season appearance. Then, in his lone start of the Big Ten tournament he held Michigan to four singles and a solitary earned run over 7 1/3 innings, but he also plunked four Wolverines along the way. But 4.0 BB/9 is closer to livable than what he’d done before.

Brecht says King taught him to be “way more intentional,” not just on the mound but in all parts of his life.

“Every night I’ll plan my day out, so tomorrow I know where I’m supposed to be and when I need to be there, and my productivity just shot up,” he said. He has what he calls a “success checklist,” which includes tasks as mundane as making his bed and doing his morning devotional. “I want to check all that off, and then I know I’m the most prepared I can be for this game, for this practice, whatever it is.”

In turn, that’s helped Brecht relax and concentrate on the mound. He says he’s letting go of what he can’t control — umpires, defense, crowd — and finding it easier to re-center himself when something doesn’t go his way; he uses wiping off the rubber with his shoe as a physical cue to reset mentally when something goes wrong. He says it’s still “an ongoing battle. I hate to lose.”

“I think sometimes athletes get so caught up in their identity being their sport. That used to be me, but I’ve grown,” he says. “I’m just going out there and playing with freedom, knowing that whatever I do today is not going to matter at the end of the day. Like, God is still going to love me. That’s helped a lot.”

To hear Brecht tell it, throwing more strikes almost seems like a side effect of growing up more generally. It’s easy to forget that while college ballplayers are reworking their mechanics or learning a new breaking ball, they’re also going through the same tumultuous maturation process that everyone experiences after high school.

“I definitely feel like I’ve grown up a lot, man,” Brecht said. “I was back at a high school game in my hometown and it just feels crazy. Just yesterday I was there, and in three years a lot has happened: I graduated, I got engaged, all this stuff. I’m 21, I’m a young guy, hopefully I’ve still got a lot of years ahead of me. I really think this is just the beginning.”