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.

This was a lot of attention for a player who, despite increasingly dazzling left-handed stuff—Yan's fastball now touches triple digits, and he generated a startling 18.6 percent swinging-strike rate at Triple-A this year—was not really all that close to the Majors until this season. Much of the reason for this is that Yan's strikeout celebrations, which are always a little bit different but generally involve him leaping high into the air and giving the pitchers mound a vigorous pat, really are notable, especially in a sport that is so often dour and coppish. But most of it is down to the fact that, prior to making his first appearance as a part of the Mets newly denuded bullpen, Yan has mostly pitched in unremarkable settings. It is the most normal thing about him.

It helps, probably, that Yan appears to be, as his former spring battery mate put it, "a good dude" for whom Doing All That is just part of his process. "People have accepted largely that this is just a good-natured human who’s enjoying being on the field playing baseball," Mets interim manager Andy Green told MLB.com's Anthony DiComo. "It’s more personality than I think we’re all accustomed to seeing after a strikeout, but we didn’t have many Minor League teams take issue with him or his enthusiasm."

This would be nice, but the early returns on that front are not surprising. He was booed Wednesday by Cleveland fans, and when the Guardians retook the lead after Yan left the game, their players mockingly imitated Yan's hopping celebration in their own dugout. His high-wattage personality might not even make him popular among Mets fans; while Yan's stuff has been more dialed-in than ever this season, he still posted a 15.8 percent walk rate at Triple-A and loaded the bases Wednesday with two hits and a walk before escaping thanks to two strikeouts. It is distressingly easy to imagine an opposing broadcaster—or Mets color commentator Keith Hernandez, for that measure—popping like an overinflated balloon upon watching Yan fire off some high-intensity choreo after striking someone out in the sixth inning of a mid-August game the Mets are losing 5-1.

There will be a lot of those games down the stretch for the Mets, which is by design. They sold hard at the trade deadline, and have been bad enough this season to stake a claim on a lottery pick in next year's draft; Yan is not there to play tank commander, but how effective he is this season is less important to the Mets and to his future as a big leaguer than how well all of his stuff translates at the highest level. To have made it to the Majors at all, a dozen years after signing his first pro contract and all those sweltering hours spent on rooftops in the Arizona heat, is an achievement worth celebrating. But it is also just the beginning of a very consequential job interview—not just with the Mets, but with every other team that could use a lefty reliever with thermonuclear stuff and believes they could get its radioactivity down even into the not-great, not-terrible range. Yan has real star quality, but he has also spent 12 years fighting to claim a tenuous grasp on a very difficult and very marginal job. That job will require him to earn his continued employment over and over and over again.

And while a big league job is a dream, it is also a job. Yan, much more literally than anyone else in his highly fungible cohort, is dancing along a knife's edge. He is also finally where he has spent his life fighting to be. If Yan's celebrations are in flagrant and flamboyant violation of many of baseball's long and salty code of red-ass rules, he also seems to understand the basic dynamic of his workplace, and to appreciate how fortunate he is to get to work there. "I told [batters]: When you hit your home run, enjoy it, do what you want," Yan told Passan back in 2025. "For me, there is no problem. Now, when my moment comes, I am going to enjoy it, too."