DRAWING TO A CLOSE
End of an era if Bautista goes
Jose Bautista hit what might have been one of the biggest home runs in Toronto Blue Jays history last October. No, not that one. Nine days after the most insouciant bat flip the baseball world had ever seen, the Jays were sputtering toward an exit in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series. Kansas City’s murderous bullpen was mowing down Toronto batters, as they do, and the Blue Jays’ wild romp of a season appeared truly doomed. They only had a few outs left.
And then Bautista hit a rocket that tied the game, a two-run shot that sent a pall over Kauffman Stadium in the top of the eighth inning, his second home run of the game.
It ended up a moot shot when the Royals won the game, and the series, by scoring the go-ahead run in the bottom of the inning, but Bautista, the impeccably groomed, ornery right-fielder, had done what he could to carry the Blue Jays on his shoulders.
He has done that a lot over the past eight seasons in Toronto. And now, Bautista, 35, on Thursday will play the final home game of the season.
Depending on a host of factors, some in his control and many not, it might be the final time he takes the field at the Rogers Centre with a Blue Jay on his cap.
And if it is, and he leaves, it will leave a hole not just in the team, but in the city.
It’s dumb, really, the way certain players can burrow their way into the psyche of a metropolis, but there it is: this could be the denouement of Jose Bautista in Toronto. At the least, it would mean a lot of new jerseys to buy.
The uncomfortable march toward this point began in February, when Bautista, an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season, arrived at spring training and plunked a large contract gauntlet at the feet of team management. He had told Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins, the new president and GM, what it would take to keep him, he said. There was no need to negotiate.
“They asked me a question, and I gave them an answer,” he said.
Reports, never confirmed by the player, later said he was looking for $150 million over five years, almost double the $78 million the Jays have paid him for the past six seasons. From that moment on, after team management had spent the off-season spending modestly, it looked like this would be Bautista’s final run in the city that he has represented six times in the all-star game, and in which he is seen selling everything from pizza to overpriced smoothies.
The old GM had massively increased the payroll and made a series of risky win-now trades to finally push the Blue Jays back into the playoffs. The new guys talked a cautious game. What were the odds that they would hand a huge raise to a slugger for his declining years?
And so, Toronto steels itself for a departure. Heroes don’t always leave, but they usually do.
The feelings around such an event aren’t rational. There are ways to replace Bautista’s production, or at least a good chunk of it, at a much cheaper cost. But sports counts on irrationality, the abject loyalty of fans who have no actual ties to the team other than emotion, as its stock in trade.
Jerry Seinfeld’s bit about sports fans cheering for laundry was quite right, and yet everyone knows someone who has ended up in tears over the plight of their chosen team. (No, that wasn’t 14-year-old me crying when the Jays blew the AL East in 1987; I just had something in my eye.)
Conversely, when Bautista hit the bat-flip home run that all but sealed the series win over Texas last October, it was absolute bedlam in the Rogers Centre. People who still had the same jobs, and debts, and stresses of five minutes earlier hooted and danced like they hadn’t a care in the world. They threw their beers in the air. Those beers are very expensive.
This is the one-sided deal that a city strikes with its sporting heroes. Its fans will invest themselves wholeheartedly in their actions on the field, and they will reserve the option, as is entirely their right, to eventually go elsewhere if elsewhere offers a better deal.
Bautista has been the leader of the latest iteration of this team, in good and ill. Always quick to argue with umpires, it was said his attitude didn’t help his team win. There was talk, after another lost season, of trading him for pitching help. And then the team started winning, and suddenly the player with the boulder-size chip on his shoulder, the guy who scuffed around the sport before becoming a superstar in his 30s, was the perfect embodiment of a team that had been on the outs for two decades and was now, improbably, a contender.
There are many excellent players on this Blue Jays team, which may yet mount another memorable playoff run, but for a generation of fans, Bautista has been the team’s bearded face. That would only make the departure that much more difficult.
When Bautista said in February that the Blue Jays knew his contract number, and it was up to them to meet it, he was wearing a T-shirt with a simple message. “Home is Toronto,” it said.
Blue Jays fans don’t quite have to consider the alternative, just yet.