The Long Way from Kauai

The Island

Gary Yates visited Kauai on a 1970 surf trip from Southern California and never left. He raised three sons on the island, and two of them pitched in the major leagues. The brothers surfed together for hours before baseball commitments, stopping for Spam musubi afterward. Tyler, the older one, eventually left the game to become a police officer back on Kauai.

Kirby came up the long way from the same island. Drafted by the Red Sox out of Kauai High School in the 26th round in 2005, he didn't sign. He went to Yavapai College in Arizona, missed the 2006 and 2007 seasons to Tommy John surgery, went undrafted in 2009, and signed with Tampa Bay as an amateur free agent that June. He debuted in the majors on June 7, 2014, at twenty-seven.

The Turn

After a difficult 2016 with the Yankees, he had a choice: go home to Kauai and surf the way he always did in the offseason, or stay in Arizona and train. Tyler told him the beach would always be there. His playing window was short. Kirby stayed.

He had modeled his splitter grip after Masahiro Tanaka while with the Yankees, and refined the pitch in catch sessions with Alex Cobb. By the time he reached San Diego, coaches and teammates — Craig Stammen among them, who noted how hard the ball was to catch — used data and video to show him the slider was holding him back. He dropped it for the splitter. The 2019 season brought his first All-Star selection. The second came in 2024.

The Hundred

On June 27, closing for the Angels, Yates recorded his 100th career save. He has never started a major-league game. All 510 of his appearances have come out of the bullpen, across nine stops: Tampa Bay, the Yankees, the Angels, San Diego, Atlanta, Texas, the Dodgers, back to the Angels, and Pittsburgh — where he is now, at thirty-nine, still pitching.

Reporting: ESPN, MLB.com, Wikipedia. Career and biographical data: MLB StatsAPI, via the Fever engine.