DUNEDIN, FLA.—While most of the attention Wednesday morning on the Blue Jays’ bullpen mounds at the Mattick Training Center was focused on R.A. Dickey – throwing his first fluttering knuckleballs to new catcher Russell Martin – at the same time, other pitchers were working on adjoining mounds, focused on their own needs, in a bid to earn one of seven spots in the bullpen.

The only three returnees from last year’s season-ending bullpen are left-handers Brett Cecil and Aaron Loup and right-hander Todd Redmond.

Then there’s Aaron Sanchez, Daniel Norris and Marco Estrada, one of whom will end up in the Jays rotation, with the others looking for a spot in the major-league pen.

But one man who seems lost in the spring shuffle is right-hander Steve Delabar, an all-star just two years ago and not even recalled from Buffalo last September.

Following his all-star campaign in 2013, Delabar suffered through a first half where he seemed to have lost velocity and command. Then came the unexpected demotion to Triple-A and the decision not to bring him back. There was a suspicion among conspiracy buffs that the Jays were trying to control his service time and not have him eligible for arbitration, but he dismisses that thought.

“I thought I’d be back up,” Delabar said. “We had talks about the possibility of not going up. My agent had talks, so whenever I didn’t go it was, ‘Okay, I can just go home and just hang out.’”

It was such an unexpected occurrence for Delabar that people believed he must be hurt or that his surgically repaired elbow with its permanent titanium parts was betraying him. He was losing velocity and command of his pitches, or so went the popular theory.

“I don’t think so,” Delabar said. “You go back and look at the averages and the numbers, and it might have been down — there’s Fangraphs – and they say it might have been down close to a mile an hour. That’s not a lot. And everybody’s saying, ‘Is the velocity back?’ How hard did you guys think I throw? I don’t throw 100. I’d say I’m probably around 94-95 mostly.

“I’m not a movement guy. I throw a straight four-seamer that has some movement on it. For myself, I was basically trying to play catch-up from the get-go. It just wasn’t there from the get-go, and you have to play catch-up. For my game, I’d like to have those numbers, but it really comes down to control. Even if I don’t have it. . . we had Casey Janssen, and he’s never been a velocity guy by any means, but he’s always been a guy with control. Even in the second half, you saw a guy like him who’s boom, boom, boom. Control slips a little bit, you can’t really get away with too much. That’s what velocity allows you to make some mistakes and get away with it.”

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Recall that Delabar was the man who introduced the weighted-ball program to the Jays’ clubhouse when he had so much success in 2013. It was adopted by others on the staff and added miles-per-hour to Brett Cecil’s fastball. But the program is extremely individual and Delabar needed an update, a refresher to meet his new needs and physical status that in 2014included lower-body issues.

“Because it is a personal adaptive, joint-threshold training, it is a personal program that you make for the individual based on their needs, their deficiencies,” Delabar said. “For me, we had to back off on some of the pound and run-and-gun stuff, because my legs, in the beginning, weren’t ready to take that load. You back off that and then eventually you get around to where you can build up.

“In-season, there was a lot I was doing, but in the off-season we could go back and basically clean the slate. You want to get it clean and go. I won’t say we started from zero miles per hour, but we were able to target and find out what we needed most and go from there.”

If Delabar can approach his performance of 2013, something he believes he can do, then he could become a valuable addition to the late-innings mix, with runners on base. But having been around the block, he is not putting pressure on himself to compete with others.

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“I’m just trying to be the best version of myself,” the 31-year-old said. “I’m sure that goes for everybody here. People are competing against other guys, but if you don’t do the best that you can do then your results against somebody else aren’t going to be good anyway. I’m just trying to be the best version of me.”

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