DUNEDIN — Four years ago Jesse Chavez passed through Toronto on his challenging journey of personal discovery.
He’s back this spring, still searching for that Holy Grail of pitching, but this time, at the age of 32, he’s a much more fully formed student of his craft, ready to contribute in any way possible to a championship season.
After career stops in Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Kansas City, Chavez came to Toronto in 2012 and while he made only nine Blue Jay appearances with mixed results, it was a stepping stone.
“When I was here the first time, I was learning how to be the pitcher I am now,” said Chavez on Thursday, a day after tossing two hitless innings in his Blue Jay spring debut. “That’s the only difference between then and now. It takes time.”
Chavez began his career as a hard thrower and, like most young hard throwers who start to lose something off the fastball, he had to reinvent himself.
“Early on in my career I would just rear back and throw it as hard as I could,” said Chavez. “With velocity, you can get away with that for a while. Then there was a stretch where everything ended up middle and you have to stop embarrassing yourself and embarrassing your team. You want to be that guy who the manager calls because he’s got confidence in you. It took a couple of years to find what I wanted to be for that next step.
“The velocity isn’t going to stay forever. Once it goes, you have to learn how to pitch. That was something I had to learn. Once I dropped my arm angles, I never got my velocity back to where it was before. So I had to learn to pitch. That was a tough adjustment because my first thought was always to reach back and let one go, just to see if it was there. And that was always a mistake. It was something I had to get out of my head real quick.”
In 2011, he dropped down to throw sidearm in Kansas City and when that didn’t work, he went to winter ball to get his conventional mechanics back. That was where he was in his redevelopment when he came to the Blue Jays as a waiver claim.
“That first go-around here I was still trying figure out who I was at the time,” he said. “I talked to Walk (pitching coach Pete Walker) a lot when I was here. He had a good cutter so I would pick his brain about that …. thought process, approach and then from there I started picking the brains of anyone who had gone through a similar circumstance.”
The Blue Jays gave Chavez a chance to start two games in that 2012 season and it was that opportunity that helped spur him on when he was sold to the Oakland Athletics later that year.
“I know the business side of it,” he says, reflecting back to that time. “I ran out of time here with the results I was getting. It’s a result-oriented game, especially in this division, trying to compete with the top spenders. Yeah, I was devastated because this was a team that gave me a chance to extend my career and gave me a shot to go out there and become a starter. It was a chance to refine my mechanics a little bit more and get the hang of this whole new repertoire that I came up with.
“I had some games here that were good — I remember a game, my first game, when I went five (scoreless) innings out of the bullpen at Texas. It was a flash of what could be. I got the chance in Oakland to extend that flash and become successful in a swingman role, so to speak. All I did was take what I had grasped here and refine it.”
Over the last two seasons in Oakland, Chavez has made 62 appearances, 47 of them starts, logging 303 innings with a 3.83 ERA. Those numbers earned him a $4 million contract and he’s here competing for the lone open starting spot on the club against Aaron Sanchez, Drew Hutchison and Gavin Floyd. If that doesn’t work out, he will have a place in the Toronto bullpen.
“The preference is always to start but with the talent we have here, it’s going to be a tough one,” said Chavez. “That’s the fun part about it. The last two years I’ve been in the same boat and I’m not one to go down to the bullpen and be miserable. That’s not who I am and not what this clubhouse is about. There will be no bitterness if I end up in the bullpen. If that happens, I want to be a guy they can count on.”
It’s been a long road, a road filled with potholes where the routing was not always obvious but Chavez never once thought of quitting.
“That’s not my mentality,” he said. “Once the phone stops ringing and no one is asking me if I want a job, then it will be time to start thinking about it. But, no, that’s not my mentality at all. There was never a doubt in my mind that I could get back to where I could be at this level. It’s still a work in progress but I’m making steps in the right direction.”