He knew what he had to do, but it killed a small part of him. And even today, as the San Diego Padres’ brilliant closer and a first-time all-star at 32, Yates can feel a twinge of regret at what he lost that winter — when he put away his surfboard, packed up his family and his belongings, and left behind his beloved Hawaii for a new life in Arizona.

“It was tough, man,” Yates recalled one recent afternoon before a game at Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards. “It’s not like I sat there and enjoyed every minute of it. When I was at home living and going surfing all the time, my life was probably as good as anybody’s. I loved my life. I thought it was awesome. But I had to do something different.”

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The decision to uproot his island life and make the Phoenix area his offseason headquarters — soul-crushing as it was for a man born and raised in Kauai whose Twitter handle is @KauaiKirby39 — put in motion a cascade of events that has placed Yates, now in his third season with the Padres, in some elite company.

He leads the majors with 30 saves, putting him just ahead of the pace of Hall of Famer Trevor Hoffman’s franchise record of 53 in 1998. His ERA of 1.15 leads the National League (minimum 32 innings pitched), and his strikeout rate of 13.85 per nine innings — largely the product of a split-finger fastball that ranks among the most unhittable in the game — ranks 11th in the majors. As measured by wins above replacement (FanGraphs version), he was the most valuable reliever in baseball in the first half.

Yates’s transformation from fringe big leaguer to top closer has been swift, complete and breathtaking. His first nine seasons of professional ball, starting as an undrafted free agent who signed with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2009, were a blur of steady progress broken up by jarring setbacks. It took him nearly six years to make his big league debut, in 2014. By 2017, he had been optioned, sold, waived, traded and released, bouncing from the Rays to the Cleveland Indians to the New York Yankees to the Los Angeles Angels.

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“There were times you’d go back to your hotel room and you’d have tears in your eyes because you think your dream’s going to get taken away from you, because you haven’t lived up to your potential,” Yates said. He singled out 2015, when he posted a 7.97 ERA for the Rays and shuttled between Class AAA and the majors. “I was hurt and trying to pitch through it. It wasn’t happening, and I could see the writing on the wall. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to face because this is what I’d worked for my whole life. I didn’t have anything I was going to be able to fall back on and be successful.”

The most fortuitous moment of Yates’s career came Jan. 8, 2016, when the Yankees purchased him from the Indians for the princely sum of $78,000. At the time, his repertoire consisted of a fastball that averaged 93 mph and a decent slider that served, such as it was, as his “out” pitch. He also threw an occasional slow curveball and change-up.

But the 2016 Yankees happened to have a handful of practitioners of the splitter — led by ace Masahiro Tanaka and including Nathan Eovaldi, Chasen Shreve and Tyler Clippard. Toward the end of that season, Yates began asking for pointers on how to grip and throw the pitch, and after much experimentation, he eventually settled on the Tanaka grip.

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It was that winter when Yates made the fateful decision to cross the Pacific to live and train in Arizona, which was less about the physical act of pitching — because even in Kauai, he would throw regularly, at least on days when the waves weren’t so great — and more about the mental leap of devoting himself fully to baseball.

“All I wanted to do when I went home was surf,” he said. “It’s hard to go work out and do everything you needed to do when the waves are good. If the waves are good, I’m going to go surf, and then I’ll get to my workout later. In Arizona, I woke up, and the first thing I did was go work out. … It’s not that I wasn’t serious before. I just don’t think I was putting in the full effort in the offseason that I needed to. Guys were getting an advantage on me, and that was showing.”

In Arizona, he undertook a rigorous workout schedule that built up core strength and stamina. And in daily throwing sessions, he focused largely on his new splitter, honing it to the point where, by the start of the 2017 season, it was game-ready. He threw the splitter just 10.8 percent of the time that season, according to data from Baseball Savant, but by 2018 it was up to 36.3 percent. This year, it’s 42 percent, and opposing hitters are slugging just .182 against it.

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“It’s unhittable,” fellow Padres reliever Craig Stammen said. “It’s funny. You watch guys facing him, and they’re basically saying, ‘We’re not swinging at it.’ So they stop swinging. And then he starts throwing it for strikes and starts throwing fastballs more. His command of that splitter is what makes it so good.”

Yates explains the effectiveness of his splitter like this: “With any breaking pitch in the big leagues, you have to be able to beat guys in the zone with it — because they know the strike zone so well. If they can recognize it out of the hand, they’re not going to swing. You have to make it look like a strike if you’re going to get them to chase. The splitter is a very good pitch, but I think my fastball is pretty good, too. People have to cheat to get to it. And once I can get them on my fastball now, it’s hard for them to hit the split, because they’re out in front. The movement is what misses barrels and gets swing-and-misses.”

On June 30, the day he found out he had made the NL all-star team, Yates held back tears as he phoned his father, Gary, back in Kauai, and said, “Pops, your son is a major league all-star.” As a first-time all-star at age 32, following years of bouncing around the fringes of the majors, Yates wouldn’t necessarily recommend his career path to anyone. But with the honor came a sense of validation that younger, more talented players, with more direct routes to stardom, wouldn’t understand.

“I’ve had to earn everything I’ve gotten — earn my way to the big leagues, earn my way to stay here, earn every role I’ve had,” Yates said. “Nobody is going to take this away from me.”