Biagini a back-to-school special
Joe Biagini strolls into a dressing room where both his locker and name plaque have disappeared. This simultaneously amuses and perplexes.
The clubhouse manager hastily rectifies that situation, slipping “Matt Dermody” out of the name slot and sliding in Biagini. (Which, while we’re on the subject, derives from “bowlegged” in Greek and “defect of speech or appearance” in Latin.)
Which is so not the perennially glib and waggish Joe at all, though he has chosen the blah “Genie” as his nickname of record on this Players Weekend of jersey sobriquets.
He was known in high school as Geoffrey the Giraffe (“because I was lanky and uncoordinated”) and Snapper (“because I was as slow as a snapping turtle”).
“I was tempted to have a lot of fun with some pretty obscure nicknames,” he confides. “Then I thought, nyuh, not appropriate.’’
Then a light bulb flickers over his head, metaphorically.
“I was thinking Biagini because it’s a weird-sounding name.’’
Anyway, as his baseball wardrobe is being hung back in the locker that he’s not supposed to have, strictly speaking, because he’s not yet, as of this exact pre-game Saturday moment, on the 40-man roster, Biagini offers Queen Elizabeth-style waves to his once and future teammates. (To Roberto Osuna: “How djyou do-eenk?”)
And if anyone had seen him around this vicinity, say, on Friday, kind of stalking the Jays, well, that would have been an illusion. Because he was not there, as per MLB protocol. Or, as suggests manager John Gibbons, who lives in the same condo building as Biagini, “maybe he had to come home and take care of some business and he came in to say hello to the boys.”
Maybe so indeed. “But you can be in the city,” points out Biagini. “It’s not like they’re going to point a gun at me. Although after pitching bad, some probably would want to.”
It was a snug domestic fit, with all the Biaginis — mom, dad, sister — in town, watching Friday night’s 6-1 loss to the playoff-bracket Twins on the telly. “Close-knit family, literally,” Biagini snorts. “Kind of weird to be here but sitting at home watching the game.”
His presence with the ball club was formally resolved after Saturday’s game, with Gibbons confirming Biagini would make the start in Sunday’s series close-out.
Biagini had been down Buffalo way since Aug. 4, there to properly transform himself into a once-and-future starter, after attempting that metamorphosis on the fly with rotationc-hallenged Toronto earlier this season, an experiment of pogo-stick proportions wherein Biagini either acquitted himself remarkably well or blew up real good on the mound, like getting strafed for seven runs in the first inning (on June 16 versus the White Sox).
He had a three-week assignment, more or less, at Triple-A, to mechanically finesse himself into a starter, rather than going at it sideways — literally, as in pitching from the stretch, which he was doing with Toronto — without major-league pressures. Now, of course, the pressure with the Jays, who have been in last place since opening day, is all but illusory.
“What did Buffalo do for me? The bigger question is what I did for Buffalo. What it did was inspire me to fight for a change of the Buffalo name. They say Buffalo Bisons, which is grammatically incorrect. It should be Buffalo Bison. Alas, I did not accomplish that.”
Moments like this, of Biaginian absurdity, sometimes makes a reporter want to smack the guy upside his head.
“The secondary objective,” he continues, “would have been to get a chance to kind of settle down and focus on some of the things that are harder to adjust when you’re here. Because you’re so set on, ‘OK, I’ve got to compete, I’ve got to give my best, I can’t risk too much.’ ”
Take the cutter. Please. No, seriously. Biagini, essentially a fastball-curveball guy in relief — and remarkably useful to the Jays out of the bullpen since being acquired as a Rule 5 player in December, 2015 — introduced the cutter this season, with wonky results.
“I was kind of doing that earlier this year with my cutter.” Whistling by the graveyard with it, he means, when the not-ready-for-prime-time pitch was clearly not there. “I realized that I needed to stop and just make sure that I had it before using it in game situations.
“You’re kind of stuck between two perspectives. On the one hand you want to be confident because that’s how you’re able to execute. On the other hand, you don’t want to be dumb about it. So, I was caught in the middle, trying to make those adjustments.”
Biagini was 3-8 with the Jays, starting 11 of 37 games in which he appeared, with an inflated ERA of 5.11. As a Bison, he went 1-1 in four starts with a 3.12 ERA and 14 strikeouts over 171⁄ innings.
3 “It was nice to be able to go down there, kind of reset and just put together a plan of the things that I wanted to accomplish. I didn’t know how long it was going to last. But this was a chance to work some out some of the stuff I hadn’t been fully able to commit to. It was a nice process for me.”
Pitching from the windup, for example, as most starters do — getting more body torque on the ball than from the come-set position — was a lesson re-learned. “One challenge is finding your rhythm with it, that I haven’t had for a while. Another challenge is, as I continue to tweak my stretch mechanics, I have to continue to tweak my wind-up mechanics. You have to marry them together to make sure the transition between stretch and wind-up goes smoothly.”
At the very least, though, Biagini has a surer grasp on what the franchise wants from him; indeed, what he has always wanted for himself — to be a major-league starter.
“For them giving me all these opportunities, not only in the Rule 5 thing but coming back this season, getting lengthened in the middle of a major-league season, then giving me time to develop and try to continue to improve — it’s all something I don’t really deserve,” he says, with genuine modesty. “They’ve been almost unfair to me, in a good way.
“Not that I don’t think that I am good enough to do it. I think I am and I think they probably think the same thing. But getting a chance to prove that to myself, to them, to the team, to the fans, to the league, to the world . . . that’s really important.”
Then he goes off the loopy end again.
“And to you too, with that glaring, questioning, criticizing look on your face.”
Aw shuddup.