ATLANTA — Bravado from prospects is never in short supply at showcases like the MLB Draft Combine and Coulson Barbiche, an area scout for the Toronto Blue Jays, has pretty much heard it all. Periodically, however, he encounters a player with the capacity to surprise and Trey Yesavage did just that during his pre-draft meeting with the club at last year’s event.

“He said, ‘I have a competitive nature, you can put me up against two grizzly bears and I’m not afraid.’ That was a great line,” Barbiche recalls during an interview this week in between draft meetings. “The more you do this over the years, there are certain guys that just kind of blow smoke, but when you’re sitting with certain guys, it’s just the way they carry themselves and when you watch them, they embody it.”

Yesavage’s bears comment may have been “just words,” Barbiche continued, “but they backed up everything you’d seen and told you everything about the competitor and just who he is.”

A year later, in the visitor’s clubhouse at Truist Park a couple hours before he struck out the one batter he faced Saturday in the American League’s 4-2 Futures Game loss to the National League, the 21-year-old right-hander grins at the memory. 

While he’s not sure about the context or the exact wording, “I definitely said something like I’d take on two grizzly bears.”

“One of the toughest animals in the animal kingdom and I think I’d hold my ground, or I would like to think I would,” he replied. “I meant what I said. I’m a fierce competitor.”

Yesavage has certainly shown that since being selected 20^th overall by the Blue Jays a year ago, ripping through low-A Dunedin and high-A Vancouver to already reach double-A New Hampshire in his first pro season. 

He pitched like a man against boys at the A-ball levels, striking out 88 in 50.2 combined innings, before finding more of a challenge with the Fisher Cats, where he’s struck out 23 in 17 innings over five starts, while walking 11 and allowing 12 earned runs, the same total he surrendered in 11 lower-level outings. 

Five of the runs and seven of the walks came in the first two starts after his promotion, when his command “was getting a little haywire,” he said. “But I was able to get with the pitching coaches and see what had differed from previous starts and we fixed a small little thing with my plant foot. Command’s been better since then.”

Some degree of adversity is a good thing for Yesavage, who remains on a remarkably fast track a year after he was drafted. Already, five players selected in the first round a year ago have reached the big-leagues, including Chase Burns, the righty selected second overall whom Yesavage, returning from a partially collapsed lung, outduelled during the NCAA regionals. 

The Blue Jays have strategically managed Yesavage’s work this year — keeping him in range of 65-80 pitches and four-to-six innings per outing — with an eye on getting him wire-to-wire healthy, first and foremost, but also keeping a few innings in the holster for late in the year, just in case.

Lots more needs to go right for a stint in the majors to become a possibility, but given Yesavage’s stuff, maturity and competitiveness, no one is saying it’s likely, but nor is anyone ruling out, either.

The trend of first-rounders quickly graduating to the big-leagues — with the Los Angeles Angels leading the way on that front in recent years and others following suit — “is great for baseball, getting to see those young players go up there and play in front of their big crowd,” said Yesavage. “As far as pushing myself there, I’m just going to be myself, doing what I’ve been doing and I know time will tell if the time’s right and if the front office thinks it’s the best thing for the Blue Jays and for myself. I have all my faith in them. They’ll decide when the time is right.”

Yesavage, of course, will tell them when the time is right based on his progress and his inner drive will be a major factor there.

Born in Pottstown, Pa., in the state’s southeast corner, he grew up with two younger brothers and three cousins who all played sports against one another and Yesavage needed to be competitive “to hold my ground with everybody.”

All of that became amplified once he got to high school and transitioned from local American Legion Baseball to the freshman squad at Boyertown. As a sophomore, he played half a game on the junior squad before being pushed up to the varsity team and while he didn’t get drafted out of high school and, in the words of Barbiche wasn’t “very famous or anything like that,” he did enough to earn his way onto the East Carolina University roster. 

It was with the Pirates that Barbiche picked up coverage of Yesavage, who as a freshman, dropped his leg kick and pitched out of the stretch with a slide step to combat command issues. At summer ball after his first season, he worked to reincorporate a leg kick and when he returned as a sophomore with the change locked down, Barbiche immediately took note.

“He found some more body control so you’d see him and you’re like, man, that’s a little bit of a different delivery and operation, which is to his benefit,” said Barbiche. 

Yesavage pitched in 16 games that second season with the Pirates, 14 of them starts, logging 76 inning with 105 strikeouts, suddenly putting himself on the radar ahead of his draft year. At the beginning of his junior season, he met with 29 of the 30 big-league teams, and by the time the spring rolled around, he’d established himself as a first-round candidate. 

“As these guys get closer and closer to their eligible year, you continue to put them under a finer microscope,” said Barbiche. “He was one of those guys where you just start breaking stuff down, and you’re like, throws a lot of strikes, he’s got the pitch mix to do it, he’s got plenty of fastball, and that’s when you said he could be a first-rounder.”

The regionals outing a week-and-a-half after he was discharged from hospital due to the lung injury, only added to the intrigue for the Blue Jays, who closely examined the medicals related to the incident before the draft and became comfortable there was no issue.

On draft day, Barbiche wasn’t sure if his years of work on Yesavage would pay off, “but when he was still around there after that 14-to-16 range, I said, ‘Oh man, he might really get here.’ Obviously other organizations have their own evaluation, but us as a group, we were pleasantly surprised, put it that way, that he was still there for our pick.”

The Blue Jays had him do some work in their pitching lab at the Player Development Complex after he signed before shutting him down — they don’t like restarting pitchers so soon after a long season with a heavy workload — but he’s been full-go spring onwards.

“I’m happy with the season so far,” said Yesavage. “The staff with the Blue Jays is keeping me in a good spot to stay healthy just to get this first year of professional baseball under my belt. 

“I’m really happy with the splitter, being able to get it to lefties and righties, throwing it in 2-0 counts to get a strike on the board, landing it a rate I’ve never done before with good command.”

Physically, he feels like his body is managing the workload better than during college, and he’s learning to adjust to the hitters at double-A, who with better discipline, approaches and talent levels, are of a higher calibre than any he’s faced previously.

To counter that, Yesavage’s mindset is to “just be a little bit better than the hitter, which I always try to be. Do everything in my power to outsmart the hitter with pitch selection and throw the best pitch I can in that moment.”

In doing so, Yesavage is living up to what coaches and teammates said about him when Barbiche did his background work, and what he said about himself. 

Each of those conversations helped accrue “an organic collection of things that build your conviction in the player,” said Barbiche, “and make you feel good about him making a difference, not only performance-wise, but making an impact on the culture of the organization, too. The type of guy that we want.”