Game 5 of the World Series was a rematch between two pitchers, Blake Snell And Trey Yesavageall of whom left Game 1 of the series unhappy with their form. That game turned into a bullpen battle, and neither starter certainly wanted a repeat of that. With the score tied at two, the pitcher who rebounded the best would likely send his team to Toronto with a 3-2 lead and the inside track on the title. Both starters went deep in the game, but in the end the Blue Jays got the best of Snell. They put in a few runs early, broke through late and held the Dodgers at bay en route to a 6-1 victory, putting them one win away from their third championship in franchise history.
Through the first three rounds of the playoffs, Snell went right at hitters, overwhelming them in the strike zone and pitching deep into games. However, he tried a new strategy to start the World Series. The Blue Jays pose a maddening problem for opposing pitchers. They look for pitches to drive early in the count, taking big, extra-base-seeking swings when they can. They are also frustratingly patient outside the strike zone. In Game 1, Snell tried to work the edges of the zone early, but he paid the price with runners and throws. He limited the damage for a while, but exhausted himself 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. Leaving it didn’t do him any good. He had been so afraid of Toronto’s power that he cowered and submerged himself from the game. No more of that. Snell’s first pitch of the game was a fastball, belt high Davis Schneider. It was a statement pitch. Schneider turned it into an exclamation point and put it 110 meters over the wall on the left.
Oh well then. Nevertheless, Snell persisted. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. upwards? It doesn’t matter; Snell’s second pitch was another fastball into the strike zone, lower third and inside. Guerrero took it. Snell’s third pitch was another fastball into the strike zone, right up the middle. Guerrero took a mighty hack and destroyed 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 previous World Series start. He regrouped with a heavy dose of curveballs, changeups and sliders, mainly aimed at the edges of the strike zone, to turn the tide. Some counts went deep — seven at-bats in the first four innings yielded five pitches or more, a huge number for the speedy Jays — but Snell stuck with it. He put his fastball in his back pocket and used it as his fourth pitch, patiently carrying Toronto down, pitch count be damned. His only blemish in six innings (after those two home runs, of course) came then Teoscar Hernández misplayed A Daulton Varsho fly the ball into a triple to start the fourth; he scored on one Ernie Clemens sacrificial fly.
Snell’s counterpart came into the game with similar hopes of regaining his early October form. Yesavage’s meteoric rise through four levels of the minor leagues hit its first real bump in his World Series debut; he abandoned his normally trusty splitter and worked hard towards an early exit. His solution was simpler than Snell’s: go back to throwing the splitter, but have a better feel for it this time. Right on cue, Yesavage threw two splits on his way to retirement Shohei Ohtani to start from the bottom of the first.
The play continued: Yesavage attacked the Dodgers’ lineup with his usual head-on mentality. He briefly became an avatar of real results; he struck out five in a row and then served up a huge home run Enrique Hernández in the third. But homer or not, Yesavage’s stuff was absolutely humming in Game 5. He struck out Ohtani, Will SmithAnd Mookie Betts consecutively to bring his total to eight. Two more – Enrique and Alex Bell – puts Yesavage in double figures through the first five innings of the game.
This is essentially the ideal form of Yesavage. His unorthodox batting and strange, backward movement keep the players off balance. Fastballs explode from his high release point. His splitter makes everything else come into play as hitters have to take it into account and still come up empty most of the time. The Dodgers had no answers. If you’re wondering how a 2024 draftee could break through all of professional baseball, from A-ball in April to literally the Dodgers in the World Series, tonight was an illuminating example.
Through six innings, these two home runs were the only daylight between the two teams. Snell’s tightrope walk was exhausting but effective. Yesavage always looks like a threat when he leaves a cookie right over the middle, but with a two-run cushion and no command issues, he never got into trouble. The Dodgers’ lineup is undoubtedly powerful, but it has been sputtering lately, and on Wednesday it was downright hopeless against Yesavage. Their best bet was to wait him out, let Snell and the bullpen hold the line and attack the Toronto bullpen.
The plan immediately fell apart, as is often the case with comeback plans involving multiple executions. Snell reached past 100 pitches to put the lefties at the bottom of the Toronto lineup, but Addison Barger singled to left (his third time reaching base in the game), Andres Gimenez was walking, and suddenly Snell was walking down the hill with Guerrero next. The Dodgers’ bullpen isn’t great at the best of times, and they had gone a ridiculous 16.1 innings over the last two nights. Edgardo Henriquez got the nod in Game 5, and he didn’t have it. Never feeling comfortable, he hit a ball to the backstop to allow Barger to score (he advanced three times on wild pitches in the inning), then let the other runner Snell score him when Bo Bichette a single strung to the right.
Yesavage also ran out of gas in the seventh. His fastball was two ticks behind. He kept knocking down his splitter. The long delay in the top of the inning, and of course the high workload of his career, seemed to weigh on him. There’s also the fact that he had never pitched in the seventh before as professional. But he enlisted a dastardly splitter to lash out Freddie Vrijmanwhich brought him to an even dozen that night. After an infield single, he produced an inning-ending double play Tommy Edmanhitting right 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 to score a few baserunners, but couldn’t even get a runner into scoring position, let alone bring in a run. They weren’t even given the luxury of facing a cleaner; Johannes Schneider never does anything halfway, and he used the powerful part of the bullpen to wrap tonight’s win in bubble wrap.
Ultimately, Snell didn’t have the tools to stop the Blue Jays in this series. He tried to make straight towards them in vain, and he had no luck surviving them either. With his sharpest equipment, on a day when his command was perfectly on point, I have no doubt he would have succeeded. But this Jays lineup is ruthless, and they are particularly suited to attacking a lefty starter who is dependent on a changeup. It was a miserable match for him, and he just couldn’t get over it.
Yesavage, on the other hand, continued its spectacular October. He has now recorded double-digit strikeout games against the top two offenses in baseball, with this game following his previous loss to the Yankees. It won’t always be this good. Teams will get more video on him, hitters will adjust to his deceptive release point. But who cares about the future? The present is here now, and in it Trey Yesavage just dominated the scariest lineup in sports on the biggest stage there is to push his team toward a championship.
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