SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- You have seen him, on X and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and every other platform capable of taking whole people and shrinking them to 10-second clips. In these snippets, Jefry Yan is always celebrating a strikeout by jumping, his knees rising to his chest, until he lands and punctuates the revelry with a fist pump, a pantomimed strike-three call, a pelvic thrust, a twirl or a dozen other spasmodic movements, depending on what has inspired him at that particular moment.
Yan, a 28-year-old left-handed reliever with the Colorado Rockies, is a baseball Rorschach test -- to some a burst of color in a monochromatic sport, to others an affront to the game's unspoken code of decorum.