The way Pillar met his wife, Amanda, is in line with the way he plays baseball. A soccer player who’d transferred to Dominguez Hills during Pillar’s junior year, Amanda was talking to Fair after class one day in the parking lot the first time Pillar saw her. He got his buddy to invite her to a Christmas party they were hosting the next night. When he heard she was on her way, he ran upstairs, changed out of his sweats, did his hair, then didn’t even let her get out of the driveway before he introduced himself. They spent the rest of the night talking. “I live in the moment,” Pillar says.

Pillar knew nothing about Toronto when he was drafted to the Blue Jays in 2011. “I think they like hockey,” he told Fair at the time. “It’s north, so I figured it was probably cold year-round,” Pillar says. The lifelong Dodgers fan didn’t even know who the Blue Jays manager was. When he was first called up in 2013, it was a whirlwind. “They’re trying to get me ready for BP, I didn’t know who was pitching, I don’t know if I’m playing, my phone was off because I crossed the border and I didn’t know about international plans,” he says. “I didn’t even know where the bathroom was.”

Now in his second full season, Pillar is more than familiar with the setup here. He’s had the same locker since day one, though everyone around him in the back left corner of the clubhouse has changed. His own outlook has changed, too: Just making it to the big leagues was once his main goal, and now that he’s had a taste, Pillar is confident he can be an all-star, that his bat will come around, and he’s putting in daily work in the “calibration station” (that’s what he calls the batting cage) to that end. “I know I’m better than my numbers have shown,” he says.

Pillar is only the sixth player in Dominguez Hills history to crack the big leagues, and the second to stick. Of all the players signed out of the draft in 2011, he’s the lowest selection to make it to the majors. It used to bother him that he was overlooked. Now he says he doesn’t care, that it has fuelled the way he thinks. “I still feel like I’m fighting battles,” he says. “I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.”

Kids are wearing capes to games these days because they want to be Superman, and Pillar regularly gets pictures of little baseball players laying out for balls, trying to emulate him on the field. He loves that stuff, though he says being called Superman “is still weird for me.” In the clubhouse, teammates have another name for him. Shortstop Troy Tulowitzki came up with it, and it stuck: “Crash Dummy.” “I’ve been the same guy my whole life—that’s good to know,” Pillar says, smiling. A couple of beats pass, and he shifts again in that tiny wooden chair. “I guess I’m wired a little differently.”