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.
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-wracking. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…”
