TAMPA

His spring training day begins around 4 a.m. Alex Anthopoulos doesn’t need an alarm clock. His wife has given birth to two of them.

The day begins with family, ends with family, but in between it’s a sprinting blur of meetings, non-stop phone calls, emails, text messages, games, workouts, concerns, more texts.

“Most days, I try to get back to our place for dinner,” said Anthopoulos, 35, the Blue Jays general manager who was born one month after the franchise played their first game in 1977.

“A lot of times I want to go home, then I have to call and say, ‘I can’t make it. Something’s comes up.’

“You’re going a million miles an hour in this job. A million texts. A million phones calls. You have to talk to everybody about everything. And you know what, if you’re in this job, you like the pace.”

This is spring training for the Blue Jays and their general manager. Anthopoulos calls it the slow time of the year. There are no deals to be made, no contracts to be negotiated. But his definition of slow needs to be understood.

There was a meeting with his pro scouts at 9 in the morning, a chance to get all his scouts in the same room for the one time of the year before they head out for the season.

“Today we went through the other 29 organizations in baseball,” said Anthopoulos. “We want to project to everyone how the next few years are set up. The areas we want to target. The players we want to target. It’s an important process to go through.”

On the way to the meeting, Anthopoulos had two telephone conversations.

“Hands free,” he is quick to point out. “And I pull over to answer texts, if they need to be answered. My wife would kill me if I did the opposite.”

On the way back from the meeting, he pulled his car over twice to answer texts.

“That’s every day,” said Anthopoulos.

The texts were from agents who represent players on the Blue Jays. They want some face time with Anthopoulos, just to do a little pre-season determination on how it is working with their clients. He wants to talk with everyone, meet with everyone, and occasionally he stops to take a deep breath. But only occasionally.

He walks fast, talks fast, and if you see him around spring training not knowing who he is, you wouldn’t suspect him to be a big league general manager. He doesn’t necessarily look the part.

He proudly wears his team jacket and his ball cap — like he should be sitting in the stands. He looks like walking advertising for the club that employs him — and he wouldn’t want it any other way.

After the scouting meeting and the phone calls, there was a trip to the minor-league camp, which hasn’t opened yet, to see the pre-camp they are running for their prospects, where the pitcher, Aaron Sanchez, tops his list for the future. The mini-camp made him late for the Jays game, because he got into a conversation with some of his scouts.

There are no short conversations with Anthopoulos: It makes for long days.

And the only thing he does better than talk is listen. He has surrounded himself with a bevy of former big-league executives on his scouting staff. He is a non-stop consumer of information.

“Guys with real experience,” he said. “And the best part about having everybody here is it’s a great time to talk the game. You have all these people, with all this experience, and all these ideas. And you want to soak that all up.”

But then it’s on to the game. There is a game every day. Anthopoulos isn’t just watching the Blue Jays. The Jays are playing on the field in front of him and he has a television on in his private box. There’s another ball game on the tube, and now he’s multi-tasking. He sees a player on the screen that catches his attention.

“The first thing I think about is, ‘What did our scouting reports say about him?’ So I’ll pick up the phone and call a scout and ask: ‘What did we have on him? ‘

“What did we think? That’s the way my mind works. I need to know those things.”

And, in between, the phone never stops.

“Billy Beane (Oakland GM) told me when I first got this job that you’ll never get caught up,” he said. “I remember Dave Dombrowski (Tigers) telling the same thing. You have to decide what you need to do and what you can get away with not doing. I’m not there yet. I’m still going too much. But I’m getting better at it.

“When I get home, I’ve graduated to the point where my phone will be on the counter. It rings and my wife looks at me. I stare at her, she stares at me and we wait. It’s OK, this is spring training. There’s nothing quite so urgent. I don’t always answer.”

But he won’t turn the phone off when he goes to bed. “God forbid something happens late at night, there’s an accident or something,” he said. “When I get up in the middle of the night, and I do this a lot, I check my phone. It’s awful, but I just can’t get away from it.”

He can’t and doesn’t want to get away from the baseball parts. That, he will always find time for, no matter how long his days may be. The media work requested of him — which takes up a lot of spring training time — he would like to downsize. The requests are daily and are national in scope, especially with the Blue Jays being the darling team of the off-season. He understands why he has to do so much media: He just wishes someone else could do more.

“I got asked to do Jim Rome today,” said Anthopoulos. “Never been asked to do that before. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, I’d just rather spend the time doing something else. I understand why they want to talk and I appreciate that, but I’d rather someone else do the interviews. I’d rather someone else be the focus.

“Don’t get me wrong. This is nothing against Jim Rome. I don’t know Jim Rome. And it’s good for our ball club to get national attention (in the U.S.). I asked our PR guy: ‘Do I have to do this?’ He said I should.”

Anthopoulos is both driven and restless at this time, with too many games to play and too few decisions to be made by the roster-ready Blue Jays.

“I wish there were two weeks left,” he said. “I’m anxious and excited to start the season. You watch these games and I’ve learned you can’t take too much out of them. Each year I’m on the job I put less stock into spring training evaluations. I’ve been burned too many times in the past doing that.”

So is there time to relax?

“I don’t know how,” he said. “Can you enjoy a vacation? I can’t. I like being connected. I’m part of that world. No matter how much I do in a day, I feel I can always do more. My mind is always racing that way. I could be here all night, every night.”

But he does get home and the kids, ages 21/2 and six months, get him up at 4 in the morning. And so another day begins.

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Anthopoulos hosted an exclusive online chat with Sun reader on Jan. 23. Here's a recap of that chat: