Biagini looking for break-out season
To say the least, Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Joe Biagini is a character.
Ask him a question, and at the beginning you will invariably get the driest of deadpan answers, hilarious to say the least. Then his real answer will come, and it’ll be as well-thought-out as you’ll receive from any professional athlete.
It’s made him a popular media subject in the Toronto sports circles and has brought him plenty of attention over the last season – Biagini has become a go-to for Blue Jays commercials and quick hits, becoming a regular on Jays broadcasts on Sportsnet.
His personality aside, there’s little question Biagini can get the job done on the mound. Sporting a 96 mile per hour fastball pitch and a nasty 12-6 curve, the six-footfive, 240-pound product of Redwood City, Cal. worked his way into Major League Baseball after undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2010. After an up-and-down season with the Jays in 2017, he’s looking forward to even better things.
“For me, the off-season was coming off what was definitely a trying year, in that there were a lot of learning experiences,” Biagini said prior to his appearance as a guest and panelist at the recent Kinsmen Sports Banquet. “I was really happy with how the team gave me a chance to go out there and really find my rhythm in my changing roles and I really learned a lot... So that fuels the motivation and purposefulness of the off-season. I try to improve all the aspects that I can; you don’t want to set goals that are too unreasonable and when you’re able to reach some smaller goals you’ll find you’re able to accomplish something you thought was unreasonable.”
Biagini started the 2017 season in the bullpen and had become accustomed to that role when the Jays’ well-known spate of injuries suddenly devastated their pitching rotation. That saw Biagini moved into a a starter’s role, where he saw middling success – a 3-13 record and 5.34 era while starting 18 games.
The sudden switch took some time to adjust to. “During the middle of the season last year, it was a challenge to make sure I was adjusting my workout program and preparation routine depending on what I was doing at the moment during the season,” Biagini said. “You know that it’s a lot but you don’t realize exactly what it is that you have to cover because there are a lot of things that become natural to you; you’re in a rhythm with it and then you don’t realize you have to change over to this whole new thing. A lot of it is very similar, but there are a lot of little subtleties with it.
“So I’m just happy to be part of this situation and being able to grow in my preparation routine and plan to be ready for the season.”
If things had turned out as planned for the Jays last season, Biagini would have been able to focus on his relievers role but what started with Aaron Sanchez’s fingernail and blister problems just snowballed as starter after starter went down.
That put extra pressure on the bullpen and, Biagini ex- plained, combined with further injuries to key position players, made things all the more difficult when it came to trying to win games.
“That just forced the team to battle all year to find that rhythm,” he said. “A team can recover from a few of those things, but it’s tough when it all gets piled on.
“The good that does is, guys can focus on getting healthy in the off-season and the team, as a whole, can see how fleeting success is at this level. So hopefully, that’s more motivation and the team can find success again at this level.”
That Biagini is pitching at all in the Major League is a miracle of modern medicine. Biagini tore up his elbow while pitching in college in 2010 and briefly thought his career was coming to an end. But the now-legendary Tommy John surgery – where a tendon from elsewhere in the body (in Biagini’s case, superfluous palmaris longus tendon, seen by touching your thumb and pinky together and flexing your wrist) is used to replace the ruptured ligament.
“It’s supposed to be four times as strong as the natural ligament that was in your arm already, so it’s not really surprising that if you take care of it through your rotator cuff and forearm, it can end up being quite a blessing,” Biagini said. “It ended up with me having a healthy arm and it was refresh and reset with my career, I was able to work on some things and re-work my mechanics and all the things that have come out of it have worked out well.” It all means that Biagini, like Blue Jays fans in general, are hopeful that the team will see a return to the form they showed two seasons earlier.
“There are high expectations and I think there should be,” he said. “A group like this doesn’t get formulated in a day or in one season, and it doesn’t last forever, either. So, we definitely have to take advantage of what we have here and hopefully we have a good chance.”