DUNEDIN, Fla. – Alek Manoah expected to make a big jump during his sophomore year at West Virginia. A highly touted recruit who’d performed well as a freshman, he’d climbed into the rotation and with continued progress, he’d set himself up well for the Major League Baseball draft a year later. Then the games started and “it just didn’t happen, went backwards,” he recalled. “Found myself middle of the season, in the bullpen, not even as a starter. I remember those days being really tough, trying to get to the big leagues and trying to get drafted and trying to do all that stuff and finding a way out of that rut.”

Eventually, Manoah did find a way out, the Toronto Blue Jays drafted him 11^th overall in 2019 and a rapid ascension to the majors, an all-star game, a post-season start and a Cy Young Award finalist season all followed. Now, after an unfathomably difficult 2023 that capsized his progress and raised doubts about his future with the club, the newly married 26-year-old is looking to draw from that college experience, even if, “it’s totally new getting your butt kicked in the big leagues, that’s for sure.”

“There’s 50,000 every night, with social media and all that stuff nowadays, things can get crazy,” he explained Friday while speaking with media at Blue Jays camp. “There have been a lot of times where I’ve gone back to old videos from college, old notebooks, old journals, things like that, trying to think of some of those sayings and quotes that got me back into my tiger mentality. So, yeah, there’s been some struggle, but struggling at the big-league level, obviously, is something different.”