DUNEDIN, Fla. — Two Thursdays ago, the phone in Adam Cimber’s Dunedin hotel room began ringing at 4 a.m. It’s never good when that happens.
“Hi, Adam — your wife’s water just broke. She’s going into labour,” said a friendly hotel employee when a startled Cimber picked up. “I’m going to put you through to her.”
Cimber immediately reached for his cell phone. It was on silent. A million missed calls. See, Cimber’s a light sleeper and typically leaves his phone on vibrate overnight, because even its low rumble on the nightstand is reliably enough to wake him. But this particular sleep followed a late-night arrival on a cross-country flight a day earlier, little shuteye before an early morning physical, and a full day of spring training activity, including a bullpen. Dude was wiped.
In Cimber’s defence, Lauren wasn’t due to give birth until a week later. Plus, on the bright side, he now knows how to structure his day to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Safe to say Lauren didn’t see it that way. As soon as she was connected with her husband, Lauren gave him a choice of two flight options to take home to Scottsdale, Ariz., that morning. Perhaps calling it a choice is generous. There was one she thought he should take. She was already on the booking page.
“My wife’s awesome — she’s clutch,” Cimber said. “She was a little annoyed at first. But I think she’ll forgive me. I think it’ll make for a good story.”
No doubt about that. Cimber stuffed some shirts and socks in his backpack, rushed off to the Tampa airport, narrowly caught a connecting flight in Chicago, and made it to HonorHealth Shea Medical Center in Scottsdale with an hour to spare before Lauren delivered River Christian Cimber, a 20-and-three-quarter-inch, 7-pound, 1-ounce boy — the couple’s first child. Everyone’s healthy, happy. Cimber’s still married, thankfully.
“Yeah, I’m an idiot,” he said. “But it was sort of a blessing that it happened early — because it was supposed to happen at a point where I might’ve missed actual games. I still had a little bit of FOMO while I was in Arizona — just with it being the first week of camp and the group of guys that we’ve got here, and the momentum we’re building. But at the same time, it’s like, ‘I can’t leave this kid.’ So, there was mixed feelings coming back. It was bittersweet not being here — and now it’s bittersweet not being there.”
It only adds to what has been a high-pressure nine months in a Blue Jays uniform for Cimber, who was acquired in a trade with the Miami Marlins last June. The Blue Jays didn’t only ask Cimber (and, to a lesser extent, Trevor Richards, who was acquired in a separate trade a week later) to stabilize their bullpen after two months of intermittent meltdowns — they asked him to carry it.
No Blue Jays reliever threw more than Cimber’s 37.1 innings from July 1 on. He appeared in 39 of Toronto’s 84 games after he was acquired, pitching on back-to-back days seven times. During a critical stretch in late September, when high-volume relievers like Cimber are their most worn down, the 31-year-old was asked to pitch five times in seven days. He retired 15 of the 17 batters he faced and didn’t allow a run.
Such was the importance and dependability of Cimber, who worked to a 1.69 ERA over those 39 Blue Jays appearances, striking out 30 while walking only five. The Blue Jays don’t get within a game of the postseason without the side-armer shouldering such a considerable innings load with such a high degree of effectiveness. He finished the season with a career-high 71.2 innings pitched and a career-low 2.26 ERA.
Now, physically, Cimber didn’t feel his best by the end of it. How could he? He may throw one of MLB’s slowest fastballs — Cimber’s 87-mph average fastball velocity ranked 743rd of the 753 pitchers to throw a heater in the majors last season — while relying on a submarine delivery, a good amount of sink and a frisbee slider to work down in the zone and generate weak contact. But he still faced more batters than all but 30 MLB relievers last season, finishing 16th league-wide in innings pitched.
A lot of effort you’ll never see goes into sustaining a workload like that — hours and hours on training tables, in weight rooms, underwater in hot and cold tubs. Particularly for an athlete such as Cimber, whose biology trends, oh, let’s call it lean. He’s loading up multiple plates from the post-game spread and crushing peanut butter sandwiches before bed to keep weight on during the season.
Of course, if he was still pitching for the Marlins, crossing the 2021 finish line as strong as Cimber did would’ve been a different challenge. Miami was going nowhere fast and finished with 95 losses. But the trade to a playoff-contender in Toronto was reinvigorating, providing the mental boost Cimber needed to keep digging deeper into the tank.
“When you're that close and you're in a hunt like that, it doesn’t really matter how you feel — it's like, 'Give me the ball — let's go,'” Cimber said. “It’s a little easier to just keep going day after day after day, as opposed to when you're not in a hunt and you're just looking to pad your stats and finish a season. When you're playing for something more than yourself, it's easy to be like, ‘Screw it. Let's roll.’ I think that's where everybody was at last year.”
So it should come as no surprise that even while Cimber was in Scottsdale for River’s birth, he continued throwing, sneaking off to the facility he worked out at over the off-season to get a bullpen in. He also made trips to a nearby LA Fitness in order to maintain his strength and conditioning routine and be able to pick up where he left off when he returned to camp.
Cimber barely slept during that stretch, squeezing in a few two-hour naps throughout the day — a small price to pay in order to keep both the personal and professional sides of his life squared off. He’s always been a big coffee drinker. Moreso now, of course. But he’s been tapping into some new energy sources, as well.
“The dad strength kicked in for sure. I’d wake up from a nap and be like, ‘Oh, right, I have a kid now.’ And then I was just off to the races,” Cimber said. “And, honestly, I'm still running on the energy we've got going around this clubhouse right now. It's easy to get out of bed in the morning when you're going to the field to play for a really good team and hang out with a good group of guys.
“I don't think there's a team in the league that would have been a bigger blessing to be traded to. We've got something pretty special going on this year and for years to come. So, I'm just thankful and blessed to be a part of it. I couldn't be any more psyched to be around this group.”
No shortage of motivators, then, as Cimber prepares for his fifth MLB season, his second in the Blue Jays bullpen, and his first as a father. The Blue Jays will no doubt be calling upon him just as often as they did last year, throwing Cimber’s unconventional arm slot at right-handed hitters in the sixth and seventh innings, and counting on his soft-contact generating stuff — Cimber’s 3.8 per cent barrel rate ranked among the top four per cent of MLB pitchers last season — to help bail teammates out of jams.
It's not so easy to do what the Blue Jays ask of him, remember. To log heavy innings, to constantly face leverage, to regularly enter games with runners on, as Cimber did in nearly half of his Blue Jays appearances last season. But it’s not easy to survive in MLB with only two pitches, one of them an 87-mph fastball, either. Yet, Cimber finds a way.
And if he was all about going the easy route, he probably would’ve left his phone’s ringer on two Thursdays ago, right? And he probably wouldn’t have thrown that bullpen while his wife and newborn were sleeping, before rushing over to a commercial gym for a quick workout. In the baseball world, Cimber’s always been a little different. Nowadays, baseball’s a little different to him.
“It definitely gives me a new perspective on why I'm here, what I'm doing. It's not just about being here to play baseball for myself and see what kind of contract I can sign or something like that,” he said. “Every time I look at my phone, I see my son, and I'm like, ‘I've got to provide for this kid.’ It sucks being away from him. But I hope he can understand someday that I'm doing it for a higher purpose — for him and for the family."
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