TORONTO — Julio Rodriguez took ball four, tossed his bat away, clapped twice and exhorted his teammates in the Seattle Mariners dugout. Sure, they were in a two-run hole in the third inning of Game 6 in this American League Championship Series, but Cal Raleigh, the likely AL MVP, was coming to the plate and the bases were loaded.
The score was fixing to be flipped with one swing from a man who’s hit 64 home runs through the playoffs. Just one hanging splitter or mislocated fastball or cement-mixer slider from a 22-year-old rookie who was in Class AAA ball a month ago, and the Mariners would be on track for their first trip to the World Series.
Yet the Toronto Blue Jays were thinking something entirely different: Trey Yesavage, with all of six major league starts behind him, is no ordinary newcomer.
“When he has the ball,” Max Scherzer, the 41-year-old future Hall of Fame right-hander tells USA TODAY Sports, “we all believe in him.”
And so Yesavage threw just one split-finger fastball to the MVP, and Raleigh scorched a 100-mph worm burner right to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., beginning a fundamentally gorgeous 3-6-1 double play that finished with Yesavage blindly finding the bag with his right foot.
