Sound familiar? Blue Jays in best shape of their lives

This story was excerpted from Keegan Matheson’s Blue Jays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

It’s Spring Training. Are you in the best shape of your life?

That’s become a running joke in baseball, poking fun at the annual news cycle. Someone lost weight, someone gained muscle, someone grew a third arm and is throwing 120 mph.

Spring Training drips with hope and nothing lights that fire in mid-February quite like the first images out of camp. The caveat, of course, is that you rarely hear these stories about the game’s elite players. They don’t need to get in the best shape of their lives ... they stay in it. The story loses steam when you’re hearing it about the same player, year after year.

Let’s toss the wet blanket to the side, though, and let that February optimism trickle in.

“I see it in Yusei Kikuchi,” manager John Schneider said, offering up a surprise name. “He’s a lot stronger. He was here quite a bit in the offseason. George [Springer] looks great. Bo [Bichette] looks great. They’ve taken it upon themselves and I know they’ve been talking about it. No one was satisfied with last year. It’s easy to start talking about that in spring, but a lot of these guys talked about it in the offseason and did just that.”

Alek Manoah is the other easy answer, coming into camp noticeably slimmer with a new hairstyle and full beard to complete the transformation. His wife, Marielena, is a certified nutritionist, and Manoah owns a gym in Miami with his brother, Erik, which surely helped.

The Hall of Fame is littered with players who wouldn’t exactly pass for Olympians, but the modern game has grown so much more demanding. Organizations now staff entire armies of trainers and nutritionists, covering every specialty you could imagine. Every movement and body metric is measured. If a player sneezes, that shows up on a spreadsheet somewhere.

Consider Manoah’s natural build, too. He’s built like an NFL defensive end. For Manoah to get his full body through a delivery, walk back up the mound and reset for the next pitch in time requires more than it would from a 5-foot-11, 190-person. Even in better shape, “Big Puma” carries a big load. Now that he’s handled his business physically, there’s room for his mental game to become a strength again. How the 2023 season snowballed even surprised him, in hindsight.

“Looking back, I was like, ‘Man, what the hell was that?’ I can’t believe that I was thinking that, doing that,” Manoah said. “It’s good to be super far away from that. It feels like that was a long time ago. I’m going to keep that feeling. It’s a long way back. We’re going to keep looking forward and moving forward.”

The most encouraging stories of being in the best shape of one’s life come from the prospects who are making that final jump. Take No. 1 prospect Ricky Tiedemann, who enters camp near 240 pounds and has gained nearly 19 pounds of muscle compared to this time last year. The Robbie Ray-style pants aren’t intentional, they’re just his 2023 pants and he’s gotten bigger.

Since my first glimpse of Tiedemann in camp, I’ve put the same question to a handful of coaches: “How about Ricky T? He looks good.”

The answer typically comes back as a combination of laughter, awe and profanity, baseball’s cocktail of praise.

Tiedemann threw a live BP session Saturday in Dunedin, facing Danny Jansen, Alejandro Kirk and Payton Henry. He was living near 96 mph, which is a fine place to be at 9:45 a.m. in the middle of February. His fastball will forever dazzle -- as long as it’s in the zone -- but he’s been particularly focused on his changeup, which comes in hard enough to look like a sinker from a pitcher without Tiedemann’s gifts.

“That’s something I’m trying to start the year hot with,” Tiedemann said. “At the end of the year last year, I really got it together, especially in the fall league. Early on in the year, it was mostly slider and fastball, so if I don’t have that change, it doesn’t really open up well enough for the other pitches to do their job.”

Being in great shape in February is a crucial first step, but life in baseball isn’t a nine-to-five. For Tiedemann, he came in heavier than usual, because he’s learned that he naturally loses weight through the season. For others, the challenge is gaining weight through the year. Late eating is always a challenge in a job where you typically get home from work at midnight (trust me).

For now, it’s all sunshine, and everyone is in the best shape of their life ... until next year.