Overview:
Shane Bieber is working to regain his golden touch as a Major League Baseball pitcher after having made just 11 appearances in the last three years
Pitcher Shane Bieber had a lot dished onto his home plate last week.
The former UC Santa Barbara baseball ace had barely returned from a three-month stint on the disabled list when Toronto’s adoring public began counting on him to be their Blue Jay of happiness.
The team’s success of yesteryear, after all, has been going the way of the dodo bird this season.
The near-sellout crowd that jammed into Rogers Centre on June 28 gave Bieber a standing ovation upon learning that he’d just struck out the 1,000th batter of his big-league career.
Three days later, the Blue Jays celebrated Canada Day — the anniversary of the country’s Constitution Act of 1867 — by handing out 15,000 replicas of Bieber’s No. 57 jersey.
Those fans would give Bieber the shirts off their own backs if he could pitch them into their second-straight World Series.
But that’s a tall ask for someone who’s just found his way back to the mound on a team that’s 11½ games back in the American League East Division race.
“I’m happy to be here with this team, this organization, playing in front of these fans,” Bieber said. “It’s been nothing but a blessing and a joy to be here since I got traded over, so I enjoy every moment of it.
“I’m hopefully touching the mountain here soon.”
But fame, as 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson wrote during the early days of baseball, is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.
She made a believer out of Bieber just three days after Canada Day when the Seattle Mariners lit him up with some Fourth of July fireworks on America’s Day.
He allowed two home runs including a grand slam by Randy Arozarena and seven runs total in a game the Blue Jays lost 11-0.
Bieber, a devout student of the game, had a typically analytical response to the setback. He scrutinized his pitch selection with Arozarena in particular.
“I’ve just got to learn from it, continue to do what I have to do to make adjustments, and be better,” he said.
The Blue Jays plan to be patient.
“He needs to pitch, he knows that, and I think using all quadrants of the plate will help,” manager John Schneider said.
Elbow Grease
Bieber, who won the American League Cy Young Award in 2020 while pitching for Cleveland, had appeared in only 11 games the last three seasons before beginning his summer redux on June 23.
He spent much of those three years rehabilitating from the Tommy John surgery that repaired a torn elbow ligament.
Cleveland dealt him to Toronto just before he could pitch again last August.
Bieber helped propel the Blue Jays into the postseason with a win-loss record of 4-2 and earned-run average of 3.57 in seven regular-season starts.
He won two more starts in the playoffs before losing Game 7 of the World Series in relief on the historic, 11th-inning home run that Will Smith slugged for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Ultimately, last year was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Bieber said. “Obviously it didn’t end the way that we wanted to, but the togetherness of that locker room and the bonds that were forged within that locker room — and honestly, in the whole organization, from top to bottom — was a pleasant surprise.”
All of baseball got a bigger surprise during the offseason when Bieber gave up the chance to more than triple his income in free agency and exercised his $16 million option to return to Toronto.
His college coach, Andrew Checketts, has turned down plenty of lucrative offers himself to remain at UCSB the last 15 seasons.
He explained his protégé’s similar mindset to Noozhawk this way: “Don’t mess with happy.”
“To experience that firsthand,” Bieber began, “and not just myself, but my family, my wife and my son, my parents, my brother … We just had the best time.
“We sat down, we talked about it, and this is a place where we love to be and want to be for the future.
“It helped, obviously, to get so close last year, and have a little bit of a sour taste in the mouth at the end.”
A New Start
He was especially comfortable with having the Blue Jays’ medical and physical training staff treat the inflammation he felt in his right elbow after last season.
“I pushed it pretty hard last year, and was happy to do so,” Bieber said. “I’d give anything to be in that position again.”
The club didn’t let him start his next MLB game until after he’d completed an extended spring training and five rehab appearances in the minor leagues.
“It’s just trying to make sure that we’re thinking about our future, his future, and the ability to win as many games as possible,” Blue Jays’ general manager Ross Atkins said.
“And a big part of that is we’re very hopeful to be winning in late October as well.”
That kind of hope can heap enormous pressure upon a front-line starter when he’s still trying to regain a feel for his pitches.
But Bieber is no novice in navigating such multilayered challenges.
He learned that Cleveland had selected him in the fourth round of the 2016 MLB draft just a day before pitching UCSB to a 4-2 win over Louisville in the opening game of the NCAA super regionals.
A day later, Sam Cohen’s pinch-hit, grand-slam homer walked off another Gauchos victory, 4-3, to put them into the first College World Series in school history.
“I was in the middle of finals, as well, and so there was a lot going on there,” Bieber recalled. “Looking back, I’m grateful for that.
“It allowed me to stay focused on what was right in front of me.
“It was a surreal moment, and that seems to be the common theme here. There’s a lot going on.”
His first appearance this season on June 23 agains the Houston Astros came to a rude end in the fourth inning when Yainer Díaz, Cam Smith and Taylor Trammel slugged consecutive home runs.
Bieber got a no-decision in a game that Toronto eventually lost, 9-7.
“Not happy with it,” he told reporters afterward. “I put the team behind the eight ball from the get-go.
“The first few innings, I was shaking the rust off, and obviously, that fourth it unraveled a bit.”
Pitching Forward
He took a big step against the Texas Rangers just five days later.
Bieber recovered from Joc Pederson’s first-pitch homer to allow just four more hits and another run — scored after the bullpen had taken over — in 5⅓ innings of work.
“It was a frustrating start to the game, but that’s baseball,” he said. “It’s an interesting game at times and it tends to work in stretches like that.”
Most encouraging for Schneider was how Bieber extended his pitch count to 92.
“I thought he was really good,” he said. “Now, you’ll talk to him in a few minutes, he’ll probably say the opposite with some execution stuff.
“He wasn’t as sharp with the spin today, sure, but he was really, really sharp with the performance.”
That performance reached its pinnacle for the fans when Bieber struck out the side in the fifth inning while cresting the 1,000 mark in the process.
Bieber notched career K No. 1K by getting Rangers All-Star Josh Jung, the MVP of the Santa Barbara Foresters’ team of 2017, to strike out on a 93-mph fastball that ran back to the outside corner of the plate.
He can still remember his first strikeout victim: Brian Dozier of the Minnesota Twins to lead off Bieber’s first MLB start on May 31, 2018.
“It was my birthday — my 23rd birthday — and my debut is a day I’ll never forget,” he said.
Strikeout No. 1,000 made him only the sixth starting pitcher in MLB history to reach that benchmark while also averaging at least 10 per nine innings with an adjusted ERA of 130 (a statistic in which ballpark factors and overall league offense are also factored, with 100 set as the MLB average).
But Bieber gave just a quick tug to the bill of his cap to acknowledge the crowd’s ovation.
He later downplayed the achievement. He noted that just 18 days earlier, Toronto teammate Max Scherzer had become only the 11th pitcher in MLB history to get his 3,500th career strikeout.
“He came back and he said, ‘Hey, congrats on 1,000,’” Bieber said. “He looked at me sideways, and I was waiting for him to follow that comment … But no, he’s being genuine. I appreciate that.”
Scherzer, who will turn 42 next month, is also more than a decade older than the 31-year-old Bieber.
Back to the Future
The former Gaucho is building himself up for the long haul.
“I’ve got a ways to go,” Bieber said. “I just love to be able to compete, and I want to do it for as long as possible and win ball games for this organization.”
The speed of his fastball is still about two mph slower than the 94.1 he averaged during his Cy Young Award season of 2020.
Most of his strikeouts, however, result from the movement of his slider or knuckle curve. He also has an uncanny knack for locating a pitch right where he wants it.
“I’ve been working on a few things, and that’s always hard midseason, right?” Bieber said. “But it’s nothing I haven’t done before … It’s not a mountain that I haven’t climbed.”
He’d like to get Toronto get back to the top of the World Series. He knows, however, that you don’t get the feel back for your pitches in just a few turns after surgery.
“It comes when you’re just not thinking about it, right?” Bieber said. “Being able to execute pitches time and time again, locate the zone, all four quadrants.
“Some guys coming off a TJ have great experiences that first year. Some guys don’t, and they struggle for a few years.
“It’s not a perfect science, so you just hope to go out there and compete … and as hard as it is to slow-play it right now, I’m doing my best keeping the long term.”
His challenge now is how to fast-play it enough to win a pennant race.
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