National Post (National Edition)
BAUTISTA, JAYS REACH DEAL: SLUGGER REPORTEDLY SIGNS ONE-YEAR CONTRACT.
BUT WHEN WILL MANAGEMENT TEAM TRULY DECIDE TO HIT RESET?
The door to the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse is of standard size, which suggests Jose Bautista will have to turn sideways to fit the chip on his shoulder through it.
Bautista, the outfielder who takes most called strikes as a personal affront, who authored the angriest bat flip in baseball history and who showed up at spring training last year defiantly proclaiming he knew exactly how much he was worth and that he wouldn’t let the Blue Jays pay him a dollar less than that, is about to paid a lot less than that.
The combination of a host of factors, primarily an injury-riddled 2016 that sent Bautista into a buyers’ market for power-hitting corner outfielders, has led him back to Toronto on a reported oneyear deal for US$20 million, plus a one-year mutual option for a similar amount.
This is not where anyone expected to be in the winter of 2017. Not Bautista, who had been outperforming his former six-year, US $78 million contract from pretty much the moment he signed it and whose US$150-million shot across the bow of the Blue Jays front office last spring signalled they could forget about a hometown discount.
And certainly not the Toronto management duo of Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins, who despite many public protestations during the last year about how much they valued Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion and how much they wanted to bring them back, were quite ready to enter 2017 without either of them.
Encarnacion’s spot on the roster was filled by early December — although management did make an honest effort to sign him first — and Bautista has been free to sign elsewhere for weeks. If bringing him back was the priority that Atkins once claimed, this was an odd way to pursue it.
Instead, they have found each other by default with Bautista unable to find the kind of big-dollar, multi-year deal in free agency that once seemed inevitable and the Jays, with an outfield hole still to fill, happy enough to watch Bautista bet on himself again. The thing they most wanted to avoid, a contract that committed the team to major Bautista dollars through what could be years of a sharp decline, has been avoided.
This isn’t management convincing Rogers ownership to substantially increase payroll while a competitive window is open. And it, conversely, isn’t the kind of big-changes-in-store move that might have been evident had the Blue Jays completely turned their back on Bautista and let him sign anywhere else.
It’s a half-step, a relatively low-risk move that takes a little of the sting out of the great Edwin cock-up of 2017 and will help the Toronto offence if Bautista can bounce back from a dismal year by his standards.
His down season ended with a quiet playoffs. He made it clear during the ALCS he thought the umpiring was suspect, but the rest of baseball, by not snapping him up when it had the chance, suspects something else.
The great question, though, remains unanswered: Does this management group intend to keep the Blue Jays in contention for the foreseeable future or will there be a down period, a retrench, while the organization loads up on young talent?
Looked at purely from a baseball philosophy, it might even be the right move. Shapiro and Atkins inherited an old roster with not a lot of prospect depth and they’ve added people such as former Boston executive Ben Cherington to help restock the farm.
But Toronto fell in love with this team again because it became really good, really fast. How much of that would survive a rebuild interregnum?
Nothing this management team has done through most of two off-seasons suggests they have ruled out the rebuild option. They signed J.A. Happ to a three-year deal last winter and Marco Estrada to a two-year contract. With Bautista and Encarnacion entering their walk years, management was able to enter 2016 waiting to see if they would be buyers or sellers in August. The team was good enough that it was the former.
This off-season has brought three years for Kendrys Morales and two for Steve Pearce. Encarnacion is gone and Bautista is in something of a walk year again. All rather familiar, this.
It’s not that the Blue Jays are necessarily closer to a rebuild period. It’s just that they aren’t any farther from it, either.