SO LITTLE; SO MUCH:

We asked big Joe Biagini about the secrets of the bullpen.

"We have a rule where we can't talk. So it's kind of tough to learn about each other. It was my rule. That was when they locked me in the bathroom so I don't really get to talk much."

This, of course, is Biagini being Biagini, characteristically droll. You never know where his skewed humor will land.

"On a serious note? I hate serious notes. We talk about anything. A lot of it is other than baseball. If you're locked into every single possible awareness of what's happening in the game, you kind of get burned out a bit. Every conversation is odd. I would say it's odd if it's not odd because there's a lot of strange stuff going on."

Quite Zen-ish, that.

"The personalities of people who make up the bullpen takes it in different directions," he says.

In the Blue Jays' bullpen, veteran Jason Grilli has been the alpha male, setting the tone, and that's not likely to change when the team makes the final decisions on its relief cadre composition for 2017. Grilli is also the primary story-teller, "off-the-record" content, says Biagini. "But pretty much everybody has a story about somebody. It's fun to tap into that knowledge."

Sometimes they play word games. Sometimes they discuss their favourite Bible verses. "We spend so much time sitting there together. You're going to go crazy if you don't come up with something. I describe it as, there's so much going on and so little going on at the same time. With so little happening, there's so much happening.''

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