DUNEDIN, Fla. -- To understand Dylan Cease, you must first understand The Genie.
Cease is a collector, and with each year comes a new obsession. By the time you read this, he may have moved on to model trains or Nintendo games, but for now, he’s stuck on vintage tees. More specifically, vintage tees featuring The Genie from Disney’s 1992 film, Aladdin.
The tees are a good conversation starter and photo op in the lazy days of spring. One day it was Mickey Mouse, the next Donald Duck. Then came the first appearance of The Genie and a Star Wars shirt that looked like a Cody Ponce special from a distance until it became clear that it was not Luke Skywalker holding a lightsaber to the sky -- but instead it was Mickey Mouse.
There’s something about The Genie, though, and there’s something about grails. Every collector has a “grail,” that one dream collectable that, if you won the lottery tomorrow, you might just let yourself buy. It’s that one miracle every collector hopes to find when they slip into an antique shop to dig around for an hour. Cease, who just signed a seven-year, $210 million deal, recently landed one of his “Aladdin grails” with The Genie’s big, blue face plastered across the front -- an original shirt from the 1992 release.
“I got into the vintage tees, then I liked the looks of it and the aesthetics, but I also like Robin Williams,” Cease said. “I think it’s cool that he basically made the entire character. When he wasn’t The Genie, it wasn’t the same. So it’s cool because it’s almost like his soul is infused into this a little bit.”
The vintage tees were just the gateway. Cease believes that, once a collector goes down one of these rabbit holes, that’s when you begin to learn new things about what you value and what really grabs you. Maybe that feeling lasts for a month, maybe it lasts for a lifetime. For however long it lasts, there’s something new to reach for, another reason to scroll eBay in bed each night, a new grail.
“I think that human beings have the desire to expand a little bit,” Cease said. “Collecting is that innate desire to expand.”
Collectors crave scarcity, rarity and good stories. Cease isn’t just a big kid who grew up liking The Genie. He’s an adult -- maybe an eccentric one -- who felt that strange draw toward Robin Williams’ very specific performance of The Genie. This is where collectors tend to have their own shared language. In so many ways, collecting shirts and baseball cards and old records only makes sense if you, too, are a collector. Otherwise, you might just mistake it for a waste of money or the early signs of one’s mental breakdown.
If two baseball card collectors discover one another in a big league clubhouse, the next hour turns into a blur, each holding out their phones with the camera roll open. One day after talking about baseball cards with Tommy Nance this spring, the Blue Jays’ reliever arrived the next day with his case, jammed full of grails. There were Ohtanis and Guerreros alongside stars of the ‘80s and ‘90s, most of them autographed. Braydon Fisher chimed in from a few lockers down, a collector himself, to say that Myles Straw has the real collection in the Blue Jays’ clubhouse.
They’re just cardboard rectangles -- some shiny, some with a “1/1” punched in the corner, some with a little ink on them -- but they evoke a feeling. For Cease, right now, that’s a T-shirt with The Genie on the front.
“It makes you feel good,” Cease explained. “It could just be a dopamine spike, but it makes me feel good. It makes you feel like you’ve done something.”
This also gets us one step closer to understanding this shared language of collectors. If “collector” doesn’t apply perfectly, perhaps it’s “obsessives” or “grail chasers.” The Genie worked as a character because someone else understood what Williams was trying to do, too.
The role of The Genie was written for Williams before he even knew about it. The movie’s producers, Ron Clements and John Musker, tasked animator Eric Goldberg with convincing Williams to take it. Goldberg took the audio of some of Williams’ old comedy specials, then animated them with The Genie. It worked, and soon enough, Goldberg found that he and Williams could speak this shared creative language, even if no one else understood what was happening in the moment.
“The Genie just gave us so much freedom to create,” Goldberg said in a recent interview at Annecy International Animation Film Festival. “A lot of that came from Robin Williams’ ad-libs, but also from one thing leading to another thing and another thing. For example, I went to all of the recording sessions with Robin Williams, which was so much fun that they had to take me away because I was laughing too hard. There were things Robin would say that he’d know I would pick up on. At one point, he riffs that he doesn’t believe Aladdin will use his third wish to set him free. He goes, ‘Uh-huh, yeah right, BOO-WOOP!’ John and Ron, the directors, didn’t know what ‘Boo-Woop’ was, but I knew that was Robin’s shorthand for telling a lie. That’s Pinocchio’s nose growing!”
Luckily enough, Pinocchio is a Disney film, so Goldberg knew they had the rights. He took Williams’ voice recordings and animated The Genie into that exact situation, his head turning into Pinocchio as his nose grew.
It was a rare collaboration and a rare performance.
What, then, is Cease’s pitching grail? Where is his dream meeting between idea and artist?
Like the creation of The Genie, Cease’s mind darts around the room in ways not everyone is able to follow. It feels like he’s found the perfect collaborators, though, in Sam Greene, Graham Johnson and Pete Walker on the Blue Jays’ pitching staff. It’s part of what drew him to Toronto. He wants to create something rare.
He rattles off his pitching grails quickly, speaking only a language that pitching obsessives themselves can speak. It might sound like babble to some, but it’s another rabbit hole to Cease, another grail.
“For my slider, it’s probably being three vert lower,” Cease said. “Right now, we’re trying to get consistency with the cut run on my four-seam as opposed to just riding. The horizontal on my two-seam and sweeper, things like that.”
In this partnership with the Blue Jays’ pitching staff, Cease’s metaphors are less … Disney. He calls that group his “CIA agents.” They provide the information and he moves in with the tactical team to take care of things. One side of the partnership provides the raw work or information, like Goldberg did as the animator. The other side performs -- like Williams, The Genie.
Baseball has winners and losers, though, and here Cease goes down another rabbit hole, bouncing from idea to idea, one metaphor to another.
“So they’re kind of like my CIA,” Cease summarizes at the end. “They give me the information, then I have to be the [one who uses it].”
Cease craves this information. He’ll come in with his own ideas, too, some concrete and some completely abstract. The Blue Jays’ pitching staff has learned when to let him spiral off down another rabbit hole and when to pull him back. It’s all part of Cease’s greatness. That’s where he finds things.
It doesn’t matter if he’s low-balling someone for a T-shirt on eBay or daydreaming about the shape of his slider, he’s driven by that same obsession. It’s that same need to feel something, that innate desire to expand.