TORONTO -- Alejandro Kirk came like a myth.
We all marvel at him now, but in the beginning, he was only whispered of. Kirk was the stuff of fables and folk tales. Baseball tends to keep a seat open at its table for every shape and size, but he was the catcher who didn’t look like anyone else. That’s all anyone could talk about. Then, they learned he didn’t play like anyone else, either.
“Kirky’s a unicorn,” manager John Schneider says.
Even now, six seasons, two All-Star Games and a contract extension into his career, those close to Kirk struggle to explain him. Veteran teammates still shrug and smile.
Kirk is one of the great discoveries in Blue Jays history, hidden away in Tijuana, Mexico, until all of the right people ended up in just the right place at just the right time. He’s a reminder that this game, so carefully projected and so obsessed with the probabilities of what should happen, can still surprise us with something we never expected. He’s an enigma.
“I wish I could say I know so much about Kirky, but I really don’t,” Kevin Gausman said. “He might like it that way.”
This is the story of Kirk, or at least what he wants you to know.
The other guy
In 2016, the Blue Jays were “in the penalty box.” They’d just signed a kid named Vladimir Guerrero Jr. the year prior for $3.9 million, and under MLB’s international rules at the time, they couldn’t exceed $300,000 for a single player in ‘16. They went all-in on quantity instead, trying to scoop up talent anywhere and everywhere.
Back then, Kirk was on the showcase circuit. At one point, the Tampa Bay Rays brought him to their complex in the Dominican Republic for 10 days and took a look, but they never gave Kirk an offer. There was a scout working for the Rays at the time, though, named Aaron Acosta, who took a liking to Kirk. The two kept in touch, and when Acosta joined the Blue Jays soon after, the first thread was in place.
Kirk remembers this blur of showcases. He was always “the other guy,” the one they’d ask to step in and take a few at-bats against a top young pitcher, maybe catch someone if he was lucky.
“At that time, it was my dream. I always had the dream to sign pro. At that time, I also realized there were a lot of players, even in Mexico, with better tools than I had,” Kirk said through a club interpreter. “Physically … they looked better. I kept working out and kept believing, but then one day, my bat started talking for me.”
That’s when the Blue Jays stumbled upon him.
Dean Decillis, then a special assignment scout for the team, was with a small contingent of Blue Jays staff at a showcase in Mexico to see a catcher, but it wasn’t Kirk. There was something about Kirk he couldn’t look away from, though, even if the first glance didn’t make sense. He couldn’t get Kirk out of his head. By the time he spoke to Andrew Tinnish, the Blue Jays’ VP of international scouting, he’d forgotten all about the guy he was supposed to be watching.
“Actually, I liked the guy on the other team better,” Decillis told Tinnish. “He can catch, he can throw, he’s got really good hands, he’s got a line-drive bat and a really simple swing and he controls the strike zone. I’ve got to be honest with you, though ... it’s not a great body.”
Tinnish still remembers the call. Conversations like that one don’t happen often.
“This is not the typical player. It’s not the typical body,” Tinnish remembers Decillis telling him. “If we sign this guy, player development is going to have a lot of questions. But I’m telling you, this guy can hit, he makes the game look easy, he slows things down, he’s got a really good swing. He can hit, he can hit, he can hit.”
These stories about Kirk still light something on fire inside the people who were there.
Everyone knew that Vladdy would be the next big thing, or at least have a better shot at becoming that than any other 16-year-old on the planet. He had the famous name, breathtaking power and a body built for hitting baseballs over walls.
Kirk didn’t fit any of those easy projections with his measurements or physical tools, which is why this means so much to the people who have been around since the Blue Jays were the only team in baseball to offer Kirk a contract out of Mexico. It was for $30,000, pennies compared to the deal they’d handed Guerrero the year prior.
Tinnish still breaks into a smile thinking about it, then he captures exactly why scouts love Kirk’s story.
“Sometimes, you’ve got to dream on guys, right?”
He called Decillis one last time and asked if he wanted to “put his name on it.” Decillis said yes, but warned Tinnish one last time. When Kirk showed up at the complex, there were going to be questions.
‘Everything, for myself’
Kirk is listed at 5-foot-8, perhaps generously. He’s done well to improve his conditioning over the years, but he’s never been confused for an elite athlete at first glance.
In fact, he’s been confused for plenty of other things over the years, from a clubhouse attendant to a stadium employee and a few other characters, but surely not a baseball player. This wasn’t the type of player that coaches and development staff in Dunedin were used to seeing walk through those doors. Kirk’s weight and physical build were always the “but” in those early days.
“Because of his body type, he was always going to be the guy who needed to prove he can do it,” Decillis said. “It’s easy to look past him because of the way he looks. That’s probably not the right way to say it, but the first impression is not great when you see him.”
Kirk knows this -- he’s known it all along -- but he’s rarely spoken about it.
“My physique, obviously I wanted to be taller. I wanted to have better tools. But this is what God gave me. I never was upset about this,” Kirk said. “I am very happy with what I have. I actually used my physique to push myself. I made myself get better. I wouldn’t use it as an excuse, that I was different from the other guys and their physiques. I wasn’t going to give this up. It made me push myself harder than anybody else.”
Kirk just needed to play. More than most prospects, he needed to play, to prove he was more than what people thought they saw.
This took a while, though. Kirk was in a car accident and injured his hand, which cost him nearly the entire 2017 season. When he finally returned later in the year, in his first game of a Gulf Coast League game, he took a fastball off that same hand and re-aggravated the injury. There was something about Kirk, though, this 35-year-old veteran trapped in a teenager’s body, that the Blue Jays’ staff started to gravitate toward.
In 2018, Kirk broke out with the Bluefield Blue Jays, posting a 1.001 OPS over 58 games. He knew he’d finally gained some momentum and his confidence was bubbling up, but ‘19 brought some external validation. He ranked on the MLB Pipeline Top 30 prospects list for the first time, at No. 29. He still remembers seeing that for the first time.
Manager after manager saw the same thing. Everything just seemed to move slowly for Kirk. It was impossible to overwhelm him.
“The one thing he’s always been able to do is the hardest thing in this sport,” Tinnish said.
All along, Kirk was on a revenge tour. He’d heard what everyone had said along the way, and yes, it’s hard to miss the comments in those early prospect profiles. One memorable prospect ranking gave Kirk a “body comp” of Chris Farley. Kirk held on to some of this and held on to the fact only one team liked him. Even as Kirk stunned the baseball world in 2020 and made the leap from High-A to the big leagues, he held on to it, but then one day, he stopped.
“I don’t feel like I have to prove anyone wrong, the doubters, nobody,” Kirk said. “I remember talking to my dad one day back then, saying, ‘I’m going to prove everyone wrong. I am going to silence all of these people.’ That day, my dad gave me great advice. He told me to forget the people, to do it for myself. Everything, for myself. Everything that I accomplish is for me.”
‘You better listen’
Kirk still doesn’t say much, but he doesn’t need to.
The Blue Jays aren’t short on talkers. As he’s grown from a rookie curiosity to the starting catcher of the Blue Jays, he’s become Toronto’s great counterweight. His pitchers know it better than anyone.
“I have to rely on him to keep me even-keeled sometimes,” Gausman said. “Sometimes, I’m so pissed off and mad during an outing and I’ll ask him like, ‘Hey, that was a strike, right?’ He’ll just look at me for a bit and then he’s like, ‘... No.’”
Chris Bassitt is trying to explain the same phenomenon when he stops, smiles and admits: “I talk a lot.”
“If Kirky says something, you better listen,” Bassitt said. "It doesn’t matter if you have 10 years, if you’re Max [Scherzer] with whatever the heck he has or if you have two days in The Show. It doesn’t matter. He’s earned the reputation. Yes, he can let his guard down and have fun, but at the same time, he’s quiet, he’s watching on. A lot of the really good players who I’ve played with who are similar to Kirky always turn into the leaders of the team. He doesn’t mess around. If he says stop, you better stop.”
That showcase game in Tijuana happened nine years ago, and look at Kirk now. He’s a perennial All-Star candidate and a cult hero in Toronto, the ballplayer who just keeps proving that anyone can do it. Decillis, who now works with the Braves, could talk for hours about that day. Somewhere, there’s a Kirk jersey the Blue Jays sent him years ago. These things don’t happen often.
“It’s a great scouting story, but it’s also a great story about a guy like him who got a chance,” Decillis said. “He was overlooked by prospect rankings, but he got a chance and he made the most of it. He’s a two-time All-Star and he’ll probably make a few more. I’m so proud of him. I haven’t met him, but I’m really proud of him.”
That’s right, they’ve never met. The two never shook hands, never locked eyes, never spoke. There was just a game, a feeling, maybe a little luck. Kirk doesn’t know where he’d be today if that hadn’t happened. We never would have heard the whispers of the catching prospect who was unlike anyone else.
“I don’t know if any other team would have given me the opportunity that the Blue Jays gave me,” Kirk said, smiling and shaking his head. “I’m grateful. I’m so grateful.”