So the breakup with Bautista has begun

Jose Bautista is a lot of things. He is smart. He is a fearless hitter. He is the beating heart of this current Toronto Blue Jays renaissance, and the baseball lion of this city. Game 5 against Texas, capped by his feral bat flip, will be his legacy here, unless he can author something better. It’s hard to imagine how anybody could.

And today, the Blue Jays don’t need to re-sign Jose Bautista. It’s not just because of their self-imposed payroll parameters. It’s not just because of the negotiating terms he has proposed, in part because the terms Bautista has proposed appear to be about the same as the terms he proposed to Sam Dyson of the Rangers, in the eighth inning of that Game 5. That wasn’t much of a negotiation, either.

No, it’s because Jose Bautista appears to have made it too easy to say no. He is 35, and he will be a free agent after this season, and the Jays are still in the unexpected window of contention that opened last season. Naturally, he wants to get paid. TSN’s Rick Westhead reported the demand as $150-million (U.S.) over five years; Bautista, in Dunedin, denied it. A team source, tellingly, let slip to the Star’s Richard Griffin that the number was actually higher.

Welcome to the PR wars. Whatever the number, it’s a ransom demand. Yes, Miguel Cabrera will make $32-million the year he turns 40. Albert Pujols will make $30million the year he turns 41. Alex Rodriguez, whose contract extension was the height of Yankees arrogance, will make $20-million at ages 41and 42.

But none of them started their deals at age 35, or 36. Bautista is committed to his craft, and he has shown no decline at the plate. (The outfield is another story.) But he’s mortal. Even if you don’t believe in the self-imposed payroll box that Rogers has created for the Blue Jays, signing Bautista for over $30-million per year feels like too much.

And in that, the Jays and Rogers are lucky. Bautista spent many years not being loved by baseball, and delivered his demands with all the accumulated confidence — or arrogance — that he has earned.

“I’m not trying to be pessimistic,” he told reporters in Dunedin Monday, on the first day of spring training. “I’m positive, and I think they know and realize the things I say, and agree with me. It’s just a matter of: Are they willing to go there? It’s not necessarily Ross (Atkins) and Mark (Shapiro). I can’t say that, I don’t know. Some of that decisionmaking of a contract of this size that I presented has to come from ownership. How much? I don’t know. I don’t really know how long their rope is to make exclusive decisions on contracts like that.”

Asked if he had sought guarantees about the club’s direction, Bautista said this:

“I can’t tell them how to run a team. Thankfully, I’m in a position where I have 10-and-5 (no-trade) rights . . . and (if ) they’re going into an extreme rebuild mode, they’re probably going to come to me at some point and ask me if I want to go somewhere else. I’ll consider those options if they show up, but I don’t feel the need to speculate on all of these hypothetical questions that are not necessary. We have a great team that is ready to win now, and that’s what I’m trying to do now.”

Bautista talked about the team’s structure, about how he didn’t believe in payroll limitations or hometown discounts, about how the Jays made a pile of money for the company last year — nearly $50 million by some estimates — and how it pushed the share price higher. That last bit may be exaggerated, but the part about profit wasn’t.

(It should be said I do work for TSN, which is owned by Bell Communications, which competes with Rogers on all kinds of fronts.)

Bautista may as well have been a Jays fan. The payroll limits that Rogers places on the Jays can be couched in accounting rules or shareholder obligations, but if you love the Jays — or if you run the Jays — it becomes maddening when this team reaches contender status, and the parameters don’t appreciably change. The proposed trade for Cincinnati’s Jay Bruce looked a lot like a team trying to get a guy who could play right field and deliver three-quarters of Bautista’s bat, in the best case, for a little less money.

But Rogers got lucky. If Bautista really wanted to throw an existential bomb into the entire notion of this franchise and how it is run, he needed to make it a tougher call. Rogers runs this team without vision, without any bigger ambition. It runs it like a business, in the worst sense of the word. He could have truly put the pressure on; he could have made it a choice.

But asking for more than $150million over five years, until he’s 40? That lets the club walk away, easy. The most logical course is now playing out the season, come what may, and then, the future. Jose Bautista may have more credibility in this market than the people who run and own this team. But it sure feels like the divorce, and the breakup of the band, has begun.