Finding his fearlessness
Bichette, who is now entering his prime, says Jays ‘haven’t run out of time’
Bo Bichette put a finger to his lips: “Shh.”
Tuesday was his birthday and he didn’t want anybody to know. But felt he had to correct an inquisitor who mentioned that he was still just 25 years old. “Twenty-six actually. Today.”
Seems like this cadre of Blue Jays who matriculated to the Blue Jays together — Bichette, Cavan Biggio and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — have been around forever yet are simultaneously forever kidlets. They are hitting their mid-20s now, the career sweet spot for a baller and deliver-us-from-promise territory.
“We’re not kids anymore,” Bichette said, in the dugout at palmringed LECOM Park where the Pirates were hosting Toronto. “Kind of young still. But not in a cocky way, you know? Experienced, with the capacity to handle ourselves.”
Cockiness never applied to this shortstop, with the signature flowing locks held back by a hairband, the diamond stud earrings, the stocky heft through the torso, the sculpted muscle of his shoulder caps — more cut than he’s looked before. It’s the result of an altered off-season that emphasized Pilates, swimming and Thai boxing.
For all that Bichette can indulge in the boyish frivolity of baseball — in the margins of the game, in the clubhouse, in the lethargy of early morning stretching — there is an essence of seriousness to his character.
He has for some time now been the voice of the team and a bringer of defining statements. A tuning fork of leadership, too. “That’s not something you can make yourself. To me, a leader is someone who leads by example, who plays the game the right way.”
Here’s one indicator of the right way: Since 2021, Freddie Freeman and Trea Turner are the only bigleaguers with more hits than Bichette’s 555.
“It’s an honour to be mentioned in the same sentence with them,” said Bichette, who led the American League in hits in two of the last three seasons. Consistency is the hallmark of a solid offensive player.
“For me to be consistent at the plate, I need to be consistent in every area of my life. On the field and off the field, the way I prepare, the way I train, what I eat, how I conduct myself.”
It is an intensity of focus sometimes lacking in teammates. Bichette keeps his mental ground zero by leading a surprisingly low-key life, stripped to essentials that cleave to bettering himself as a baseball professional. He lives in downtown Toronto but rarely ventures beyond the ballpark, maybe four or five times a year for dinner. He clings to a small group of intimate friends and steeps himself in Netflix (he is currently binging on “Griselda”).
“I’m not a loner, maybe a bit of an introvert.”
He’s all about the ball. And the scar tissue that has built up the last couple of seasons, where the Jays were predicted to soar yet banged their heads against the anvil of the wildcard series.
“We’ve always believed in ourselves yet we’ve never got it done,” he said, seemingly mystified.
At some point, even if the internal assuredness hasn’t eroded, the flagship Jays have to cease talking a big game while playing a small one, especially when it counts the most.
That’s why, in his first scrum of spring training, Bichette cut to some harsh truths about expectations unfulfilled. “I don’t think we’ve earned the right as a team to be taken at our word for it.”
Bichette has doubled down on that self-searing credo. “We’ve made the playoffs the last two years. What you come to understand is how hard it is to win. It takes a lot of things coming together and that hasn’t happened for us.”
Certainly it didn’t come together last year when the trajectory felt off, the season held together by topnotch pitching. Nothing about Toronto hitters put a tremble in opposing teams and that was analytically inexplicable.
Deficiency can’t be laid at Bichette’s feet. He has hit .290 or better in all five of his big-league seasons, three times finishing above .300. He was a doubles machine (43) in 2022 (30 in 2023), and batted .306 in 135 games last year, with an OPS of .814 and 20 home runs. Of the 15 hits Toronto put up in a twogame wipeout by Minnesota last October, Bichette accounted for four of them.
Bichette obsessed, evaluated and assessed over the why of that over the winter, first disengaging entirely from baseball and mellowing on Tampa-area beaches, a local resident since his high school days. There was no eureka moment when the season made sense, more a grim realization.
“We weren’t good enough. It’s not something that you can expect to happen all at once, just because you believe you’re good enough. If we want to win a World Series, we have to be better, much better.”
There is, truly, no area of weakness in Bichette’s game, not anymore. Even the defensive flubs and foibles at short — his Achilles heel — have been straightened out, alleviated by the off-season tutorials he sought from the likes of Troy Tulowitzki and Barry Larkin.
“I learned from them, but it’s not like I didn’t know what my issues were. I never lacked for confidence, either. I knew that I was overthinking things, overthinking how I could catch the ball, overthinking how I would throw it.
“It was more a question of finding that fearless part of myself again. The way you are when you first break into the league and believe you can do anything. Then pretty quickly you realize you don’t, so you’re not playing free and easy anymore.”
Deleting the anxiety, the tenseness, resulted in Bichette posting the best defensive numbers of his career, dinged for a mere eight errors last season while posting a .980 fielding percentage.
Having no fear is sage advice for his team, Bichette said. Where they once overflowed with faith and conviction, the Jays fell afoul of their own doubts last season, impacted considerably by marquee players struggling or regressing in ways that hadn’t been anticipated.
It is far too early, on the evidence of spring training, to know whether the team has wrestled its demons to the mat. And of course upper management did precious little over the winter to correct the roster’s flaws. It’s impossible to gauge how much the players feel let down by what wasn’t done. In many quarters, there’s a sense that that the window of opportunity on this core group is about to slam shut.
“We haven’t run out of time,” Bichette said, pointing out that he and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. have two years left on their contracts. But …
“I think that just as we, players, hold ourselves to pretty high standards, just as we expect to give our very best, the same should be said about what happens outside of the players. It should be reciprocal.”
Though he won’t take that thread of conversation any further, he means, I think, that management hasn’t kept its side of the covenant. But I wouldn’t want to put words in Bichette’s mouth.
Instead, he repeats his one-word mantra.
“Fearless.”