DENVER -- On June 10, Jason Delay was called into Miguel Perez’s office at Victory Field in Indianapolis. The manager for Triple-A Indianapolis told the catcher that he wouldn’t be getting playing time behind the plate going forward.

It was the story of Delay’s Minor League life, and it was getting to the point where he had begun to question whether he should continue pursuing his baseball dream.

“I hadn’t played for three weeks, and I was having some tough conversations with family about whether this was something I wanted to do,” Delay said after the Pirates’ 13-2 loss to the Rockies at Coors Field on Friday night. 

“I was essentially a bullpen catcher at Triple-A.”

Delay was talking to his agent, too. And his agent kept bringing up one specific name.

“My agent kept saying, ‘Mike Yastrzemski, Mike Yastrzemski,’” Delay said. “Another Vanderbilt guy. But I was just thinking, ‘I don’t know. Is it going to be the same? Is that a one-in-a-million story?’”

Exactly three years prior to the day that Delay said those words, Yastrzemski was fielding questions from the media around his locker at Coors Field not 75 feet away from Delay’s locker on Friday. The Giants had nearly optioned the struggling Yastrzemski, who had gone 0-for-8 over his previous two games and had a .677 OPS on the season, to Triple-A the day before.

But on July 15, 2019, Yastrzemski’s season, and his career, turned around. The media scrum surrounding his locker was eager to get his thoughts on a game in which he went 4-for-6 with a double and a homer, sparking a run to the end of the season over which he posted a .943 OPS with 16 homers for San Francisco.

Delay certainly didn’t expect that to happen for him. The Indianapolis club was headed to Gwinnett to begin a road trip four days later, and since Gwinnett is 10 miles from where Delay grew up, he was taking a long, hard look at the Indianapolis clubhouse, thinking it might be the last time he’d be in there.

“I had it in my mind that we’re going home, and I might not come back if it was going to continue this way,” he said.

But just as he was on the precipice of bringing an end to his baseball career, Delay got a phone call. He was being summoned to join the Pirates’ taxi squad in St. Louis. Then Pirates right-hander Duane Underwood Jr. was placed on the COVID-19 injured list.

On the same day that Triple-A Indianapolis arrived in Gwinnett, Delay made his MLB debut at Busch Stadium. And since that day, he’s not only played well in the big leagues, but he got a significant vote of confidence from the Pirates prior to Friday’s series opener against Colorado.

The Bucs had a decision to make with its catching corps, and instead of sending Delay back down to Indianapolis, they optioned Michael Perez, who, despite hitting three homers in a game earlier this year, was struggling at the plate to the tune of a .527 OPS for the season.

What led to Delay getting to stay with the Pirates over Perez? Other than Perez’s offensive struggles, Delay had acquitted himself with aplomb over the first 10 games of his Major League career. He entered Friday hitting .292 and had delivered some big hits, including an RBI single that proved to be the difference in a 3-2 win over the Marlins on Tuesday. And for a catcher who prides himself on his defense, he had thoroughly impressed manager Derek Shelton.

“It shows you that we feel really strongly about how Jason has caught the baseball,” Shelton said. “He’s done a really nice job. He’s executed at the plate, had some big hits for us, and we just thought that he [earned] a little longer runway to continue catching here.”

The plane on that runway had been taxiing for quite a while, and for a time, it seemed that the ... delay for takeoff would be interminable.

But as he stood at his locker in the Coors Field visitors’ clubhouse after delivering another RBI single Friday night, Delay was able to reflect, if ever so briefly, on a life-changing week.

“It was close to being a lot different,” Delay said. “Not many people know how close I was to walking away.”