Resplendent in their home whites, the Blue Jays drift back to the clubhouse after gathering for their annual team photo on the Rogers Centre infield. On the way down the dugout steps, Justin Smoak says to a small man just ahead of him, "Hey, Figgy, how many team pictures is this for you?"

Figgy does not reply. Perhaps he doesn't hear the question. Perhaps he doesn't understand it, because for 41 years, since he came from the Dominican Republic to the United States to play baseball, his words and thoughts have remained resolutely Spanish, although he understands more English than he often lets on.

But if he had answered Smoak in Spanish, Figgy would have said: Veintisiete. Twenty-seven.

That's how many team photos he has sat for. His teams have featured Tony Fernandez and Dave Stieb, and Jose Bautista and Marcus Stroman, and everyone in between. No one has worn the Blue Jays uniform longer than Jesus Figueroa.

Everyone calls him Figgy. He wears No. 65. He is quiet, and a little on the shy side. He is also known as a human pitching machine, an inveterate eater and a man with an impressive wardrobe.

As someone who has hung around the Blue Jays for more than 15 years, I find it difficult to write about Jesus Figueroa without abandoning journalistic formality and simply calling him Figgy. I wonder how many players over the years even knew his real name. He wears his last name on the back of his jersey, but if the letters spelled Figgy instead of Figueroa, nobody would give it a second thought.

Who's that?

Why, that's Figgy.

If you're a Jays fan, the question would probably not even enter your mind, because you probably have not even noticed Figgy. He may be the longest-serving Blue Jay, but he is probably the most obscure—the Blue Jay about whom the fewest words have been written. As you will see, that oversight is about to be corrected.

Figgy is a left-handed batting practice pitcher, and by the time the gates open at Rogers Centre, his work is done and he is in the clubhouse, eating. He is 5'10" and weighs about 160 pounds, the same as his dimensions during his playing days, but the joke is that Figgy is always eating.

"He eats a lot," says third-base coach Luis Rivera, "but he never gains weight. He's getting older. You'd think he'd gain weight."

Figgy, who turned 59 in February, confirms the story when I ask about his daily routine.

"I get here, I eat," he says through Josue Peley, the team's new Spanish-to-English translator. "I do my exercises, go in the weight room. I eat again. I throw batting practice. I eat. The guys laugh at me because I have that reputation of always eating. They make fun of me because I eat so much and I love it."

Pely interjects in both languages: "He's the one that eats the most."

Figgy laughs.

"No, no," he says. "There's at least five guys that eat more than me."

Clubhouse manager Kevin Malloy, who has worked for the Blue Jays since 1982, gets the final word here: "Pound for pound, Figgy is the biggest eater I've ever seen come through this clubhouse."

Jesus Figueroa was born poor in Santo Domingo in 1957 and soon came to love baseball. In his early teens, super-scout Epy Guerrero spotted him. Thus began an odyssey that led Figgy to the big leagues for a single season, and later to a year in the minors with the Blue Jays, and then back to the Dominican to work for Guerrero, and finally to the big leagues again to do a job that fanfare forgot.

"I was always playing in my backyard and Epy was always around," Figgy recalls. "He offered me a job to go play in Venezuela, but I didn't want to go there."

So he stayed home, and kept playing ball. Epy was still always around. Then, at 16, Figgy decided to join the army.

"We didn't have money," he says. "We didn't have anything. I fought with my mom because she said I was going to die because I was too young to go to the army. But that was the only thing I had. My dad agreed with that, but I fought with my mom because she thought I was going to die. She thought there were guns everywhere. She had no clue what the army was."

Among other things, the army was an opportunity to continue playing ball. Two years later, Guerrero convinced him to accept an offer to sign with the New York Yankees. Figgy says Guerrero had "an arrangement" that excused him from the military, allowing him to start his pro career with the Yankees' farm team in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Guerrero, who died in 2013 at 71, was a legendary scout who worked for four clubs, including the Blue Jays for nearly a decade. Over 40 years, he sent more than 50 players to the big leagues, including Tony Fernandez, Damaso Garcia and Carlos Delgado.

And Figgy.

After three years in the Yankees' system, Figueroa moved to the Cubs, and in 1980 he made the team out of spring training and spent the entire season in the majors as a backup outfielder and pinch-hitter. He batted .253 in 115 games. He also hit one home run, a solo shot in Wrigley Field.

"I totally remember," he says. "I remember the pitcher was a black-skinned pitcher, but I don't remember who it was."

Eddie Solomon of the Pirates, I say.

Figgy smiles. Si, he says.

But that was not his fondest memory in the majors. When I ask about that, this time he remembers the pitcher's name.

"The thing I will never forget was my first base hit, off Frank Pastore, the Cincinnati pitcher," he says. "It went to centre field."

It happened 36 years ago this week, on May 2, 1980, in the seventh inning. The Cubs and Reds were tied 2-2. Figgy led off with a pinch-hit single but was stranded and replaced in a double-switch. The Cubs scored eight runs in the top of the 12th and won 12-4.

After that season, he would never play in the big leagues again.

"They traded me to San Francisco and I was supposed to be their starting centre fielder, but I got hurt in the Dominican—my groin—and that's why I couldn't play for the Giants," he says.

The injury forced him to miss almost the entire 1981 season. After a year in the Mexican League and a year in Double-A with Toronto, he retired. He was 26. He says he never regained his speed after the injury.

So you were fast, I say.

"Yes," he says. "I was a 6.5 runner in the 60-yard. But the injury was too much so I retired. I covered a lot of ground in centre field. But I couldn't do it any more."

So he went back home and threw batting practice at Epy Guerrero's academy in the Dominican. And then the Jays told Guerrero they needed a left-handed batting practice pitcher, and did he know anybody.

In the Dominican, Epy Guerrero knew everybody.

Nowadays, when he's not eating, Figgy becomes the human pitching machine, which is not an exaggeration. Especially on days when the Blue Jays' opponent is a left-hander, he throws batting practice, and his routine is indeed machine-like. His countenance is stoic. At the end of each delivery, he does a little two-step. Every delivery is an exact duplicate of the previous one. His expression never changes.

Alex Andreopoulos, the Blue Jays' bullpen catcher, also throws batting practice. He estimates he throws 120 pitches on an average day. At that rate, Figgy has probably thrown about half a million batting practice pitches during his 26-plus seasons on the job.

Yes, he admits, that rubber arm occasionally tightens up.

"It hurts sometimes, but never enough to where I have to stop throwing," he says.

"I think it's natural for me. I walk a lot, I throw a lot, I do exercises to keep it in shape, but mostly I think it's just natural."

I ask him how long he expects to keep this up. He laughs. Among his several laughs during our interview, this one is the loudest.

"Until the arm just gives up," he says.

I try to imagine throwing batting practice for 27 years. I think of all those times I have watched Figgy attaching rubber tubing to a chain-link fence or dugout rail to stretch out his old shoulder, and I wonder: Doesn't it ever get boring? Don't you ever get tired of it?

"I always feel good," he says. "At the end of the day, it's my job, and I love it."

And, of course, this is his 28th year in the major leagues, counting that one year he played for the Cubs. Five times—1989, 1991, 1992, 1993 and 2015—he collected a nice postseason bonus.

Let's face it. It does seem boring. Figgy's job is to groove pitch after pitch, day after day, year after year, all the while making Blue Jays batters think that if they can hit Figgy's left-handed fastball, they can maybe hit Chris Sale's.

Boring? Maybe to an outsider. But the job suits him. The monotony, the sameness of each day, seems to mesh contentedly with his personality.

"He stays in his lane," says Rivera, the occasional caddy when Figueroa hits ground balls to infielders. "He doesn't get into anybody's conversations. He doesn't express any opinions."

But in Figgy's monotonous lane, a few legendary stories have emerged. Malloy, the veteran clubhouse manager, knows most of them. He has a locker next to Figgy's and probably knows him better than anyone. Malloy is one of the few to have daily conversations with Figgy in English. Figgy is far from fluent, but in a safe space, he can certainly make himself understood. His reticence to speak English is clearly a choice.

"It's not a crime for me not to speak English, so I just live with it," he says with a smile.

After all those conversations, Malloy says he still knows little about Figgy's private life. He knows Figgy likes to listen to salsa music. And when the Jays go on the road, Figgy hits the clothing stores.

"He's the nicest-dressed batting practice pitcher in baseball," Malloy says.

Among Blue Jays longtimers, perhaps the most famous Figgy story goes back to the late 1990s, when assistant GM Tim McCleary assigned him to sit in the stands with a radar gun and chart pitches. It seemed like a fairly straightforward task.

"A couple times he did it, he was finished in the fourth or fifth inning," Malloy recalls. "That was all he got in his report. So the pitching coach said, 'What happened to the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth innings?'"

"Gun no work," Figgy replied.

He had neglected to recharge the gun's batteries overnight. The gun had two sets of batteries, but charging them seemed to be a challenge. This happened more than once. And in his reports, the story goes, every pitch—fastball, curveball, slider or changeup—was recorded at 91 or 92 mph. So during one spring training, a frustrated McCleary decided to sit in the stands with Figgy and teach him the art of charting pitches.

In Fort Myers, where the Jays were playing the Twins, McCleary and Figgy took adjacent seats and Figgy began to unpack his equipment. But the case he brought contained a video camera, not a radar gun. McLeary gave up. Figgy would no longer chart pitches.

That was fine with Figgy. He didn't want to do it anyway. He later told Malloy that after throwing batting practice, his arm was too tired to firmly aim a radar gun for nine innings.

In the early 1990s, the Jays tried to make Figgy a bullpen catcher. He had never caught, and dealing with the likes of Duane Ward's slider was far more dangerous than serving in the Dominican army.

"Guys didn't want to pitch to him because they were afraid they were going to hurt him, and he's left-handed and they weren't comfortable with that," Malloy says.

Another experiment aborted. But Figgy did like the costume.

"After he quit catching, he continued to wear his catcher's gear in the bullpen," Malloy says. "I was actually getting texts from Blue Jays fans asking, 'Who's that guy in the bullpen that wears catcher's gear all the time but never catches?' That masquerade went on for months."

Eventually, Figgy abandoned the catcher's gear. These days, besides throwing batting practice, his job includes flipping soft-tosses to hitters in the indoor batting cage during games. Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista are among those who like to take extra swings while the game is in progress.

The kid that Epy Guerrero recruited as a teenager considers himself fortunate. He's in the big leagues at 59. He is a creature of habit with a job that provides a steadfast routine. He exercises, eats, throws BP, eats again and spends most of each game sitting in the bullpen.

I ask him whether he finds it frustrating that the constant English chatter shuts him out of the dialogue. He says he feels fine about that. It is no crime not to speak English, he repeats.

Peley, the translator, chimes in.

"He's fine with everything. If there's one word for Figgy," Peley says, "it's fine."

It reminds me of something Luis Rivera had said: Figgy stays in his lane.

That lane, for 27 seasons, has never taken a detour. And Figgy is clearly fine with that.

Postscript: Figgy may be a footnote in Blue Jays history, and that too will likely be fine with him—"I've made a lot of friends here," he says—but he holds a special place in the heart of at least one Blue Jays fan.

Mike Cormack is Sportsnet's senior producer of multi-platform NHL content and the proud owner of perhaps the only 20th-century Jesus Figueroa jersey in the public domain. Cormack bought it off a "game-worn" rack at a Rogers Communications employee sale several years ago. Inside the road-grey jersey, at the top of the back, are sewn three numbers: 65 (the jersey number), 1989 (the year of issue) and 1 (denoting the first of two sets of jerseys typically issued). That means that Cormack owns the first road jersey Figgy ever wore.

Cormack calls his jersey The Figueroa.

In 2010 or thereabouts, he wore The Figueroa to a spring training game in Tampa, where the Jays were playing the Yankees.

"Once inside the park, our seats were down the left-field line," Cormack says. "Around the middle innings, I must have got up and turned my back because the entire Jays bullpen started shouting, 'Figueroa! Figueroa!'

"I walked down the aisle to the rail to get as close as I could to the bullpen. A couple of pitchers then asked me to turn around while they motioned to other players to hurry over and check out the jersey. They thought it was hilarious."

Cormack also proudly wore The Figueroa to Fenway Park in 2011.