It’s Jefry Yan Time

Years before he figured it out enough to make his Major League debut on Wednesday night at the age of 29, which in turn was long after his career ended for the first time, you could find coverage of Jefry Yan celebrating otherwise unremarkable strikeouts in wild and demonstrative fashion in decidedly unremarkable settings. MLB.com posted a supercut of Yan absolutely going the hell off in Dominican Winter League games back in 2024, and similar spring training highlights abounded on team-affiliated social media in 2025. There’s a slightly more subdued—this is very much relative—highlight of him striking out the side in a Triple-A game against the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs back in June of this year. When MLB.com’s Jack Magruder wrote about Yan in spring of 2025, then-Rockies catcher Jacob Stallings noted, correctly, that “it is pretty well-documented that he’s going to get excited, so nobody is going to get surprised by it.” He added that Yan was “a good dude.”

In a feature story about him for ESPN that year, Jeff Passan noted that Yan impressed the woman he would go on to marry with his “effortless dancing” when they met at a Phoenix club back in 2017. At the time, Yan was working as a deliveryman and roofer in the mornings—he was also the subject of a delightful story headlined “Colo. Rockies Pitcher Jefry Yan Won’t Give Up A ‘Shingle'” at Roofing Contractor Dot Com in spring of 2025—and playing for a local semi-pro team called The Expendables while training to get back into organized baseball in the evenings. Yan had signed with the Angels as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican Republic, got Tommy John surgery before he turned 20, then spent years on the Los Angeles Angels’ restricted list after refusing his third assignment to their Dominican baseball complex.

Yan’s stuff ticked up significantly upon joining the Marlins organization in 2021, after finally being granted his release by the Angels, but not in a way that put him especially close to the bigs. Keith Law gave him a couple of sentences in his Marlins prospect write-up that winter, the last of which aptly summed up the kind of prospect that Yan was at the time, and mostly has been through his career. “He hasn’t thrown a lot of strikes—25 walks in 31 pro innings last year, with 51 strikeouts,” Law wrote. “But it’s wow stuff and a hell of a story if he makes it.” Yan made it as far as Triple-A in three seasons with the Marlins—he allowed 10 earned runs and issued nine walks in six innings there—before spending a similarly electric and infuriating season in Japan and then another at Triple-A with the Rockies last year.