Jays stay brash
Jose Bautista, teammates say they won’t tamp down style, no matter who complains,
The Toronto Blue Jays remain the bad boys of baseball — loud, emotional, passionate and really not giving a damn what you think of them.
Jose Bautista, the face of the organization, has a hearing Thursday morning at the Major League Baseball offices to explain himself and avert a suspension for his actions and comments relating to the team’s recent brawl against the Texas Rangers. He skipped the team bus late Tuesday night to convey the sentiments of the entire frustrated team to USA TODAY Sports.
“There’s no reason why people should hate us because we play with emotion,” Bautista said in the quiet of Yankee Stadium’s visitors clubhouse after the Blue Jays’ loss, which dropped them to last place in the American League East. “We have a lot of personalities that wear their emotions on our sleeve. That’s our style. We like it. We embrace it.
“And we’re not going to shy away from it. We don’t go around telling people how to act or do their job, so why should people try to do that to us? We’re not going to change who we are.”
Oh, and if you don’t want to know the truth, he said, don’t ask the questions, because you might hate the answers.
“We don’t lie. We’re real,” Bautista said. “We’re straight up and honest about everything in here. A lot of clubhouses are not like that. People put up fronts. People lie. People cover their stuff up. We don’t do that. There’s no phoniness in here, but there’s a lot of people in the league not like that.
“So I think sometimes people have trouble believing the fact that we’re honest and straight up. I think they get confused. They think we’re phonies, like the rest.”
You don’t like Bautista’s bat flip after his Game 6 division series home run vs. the Rangers? Then don’t let him hit Toronto’s most dramatic homer since Joe Carter’s 1993 World Series-clinching walk-off.
“It was 22 years of bottled emotion into one building. I don’t see what the big deal was,” Bautista said. “I see bat flips every single day on a Tuesday night in Kansas City or San Diego. I didn’t plan it and didn’t try to humiliate or offend anybody by it, but obviously losers always get offended.”
The Rangers showed their displeasure when pitcher Matt Bush drilled Bautista in the ribs last week. Bautista responded with a hard slide into Rougned Odor at second base, and Odor came out swinging, leading to the brawl that resulted in Odor’s eight- game suspension and Bautista’s one-day suspension.
“I was playing baseball that day,” Bautista said. “I don’t know if everyone was.”
You don’t like reigning MVP Josh Donaldson’s style? You better keep your thoughts to yourself, as the Minnesota Twins discovered last weekend when he homered and glared at Twins bench coach Joe Vavra, still livid that he yelled at him a day earlier for not hustling to first base.
“I go about my business in a certain way,” Donaldson said. “And as long as the people in my clubhouse appreciate what I do, ultimately that’s all that matters. I can’t control what people necessarily think of me, nor do I care, but I will stand my ground.”
And if you simply just don’t like the Blue Jays? Well, their comeuppance might be at hand. The defending AL East champs entered Wednesday with a 22-25 record, seven games behind the division-leading Boston Red Sox.
“We have a passionate bunch, maybe the most passionate bunch I’ve ever been around,” Toronto knuckleballer R.A. Dickey, 41, said. “The only problem with passion is that it can work the other way, too. So when you’re not performing well consistently, you carry a lot of weight.
“I love how passionate we are, but sometimes we can be really hard on ourselves, and that causes another type of momentum that’s not as healthy. We’re kind of in the middle of that now. When you’re on a downward trend like we have been on, you have to find ways to arrest it. That’s what we’re looking for.”
The Blue Jays, who led baseball in 2015 with 891 runs — 127 more than the runner-up New York Yankees — and outscored opponents by 221 runs, have disappeared offensively. They have the third-worst offense in the AL and are averaging 3.96 runs per game compared with 5.5 a year ago.
“That’s been the mystery,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said. “We know we’ve got a good hitting team, but, then again, last year might have been an aberration, too. To score more than 100 runs than the next-best team, sometimes it’s just one of those years, man. You can’t explain it.”
The frustration at times has been unbearable, with Gibbons having been ejected four times, suspended for three games and fined $10,000. In the last nine games, he has lasted nine innings three times. Wife Julie teased him on Monday’s day off in New York, making sure he wouldn’t be ejected while watching a softball game in Central Park.
“We’ve got guys who have been very good players, but they’ve also been known to chap some opponents the wrong way,” Gibbons said. “But the one thing I notice about star players at this level is they don’t care about things like that. They don’t care if they get ripped or people come down on them hard. In a lot of ways, it motivates those guys. And we have a motivated team.”
The Blue Jays remain con- vinced their talent, passion and confidence make them the team to beat. Bautista, Donaldson, Edwin Encarnacion and Troy Tulowitzki, who have combined for 15 All- Star appearances, can’t keep hitting .231 all season.
“We’re not worried about the big picture right now,” Bautista said. “Everybody in here just knows that we should not be playing this badly. We’re not acting like we should win 120 games, but we know we’re consistently better than this.”
They were in a similar predicament a year ago. They didn’t climb over .500 for good until July 30, right after acquiring David Price, Tulowitzki and veteran reliever LaTroy Hawkins.
They can’t count on trade reinforcements again, not with a depleted farm system and Bautista and Encarnacion eligible for free agency after the season, with no signs deals will be consummated before they test the market.
“To say that I never think about it, I would be lying,” Bautista said. “It’s impossible not to talk about it or acknowledge it. But I can’t tell you that it affects me when I’m out on the field. I don’t want to go anywhere else. I’d love to stay. It’s not up to me, though.”
Bautista helped established the team’s persona, one that might reflect the ethos of its city.
“I think we’ve kind of embodied the whole Toronto mantra,” ace Marcus Stroman said, “that it’s Toronto against the world in all sports. We just have a lot of personalities and guys who aren’t scared to let their emotions show on to the field. That’s us.
“We’re not scared. We’re not worried. We know what we’re capable of. We’re just going to keep being ourselves. Hopefully the tide will turn shortly for us.”
Like it or hate it, the Blue Jays aren’t changing.
“We’re different, man, that we can rub people the wrong way,” reliever Drew Storen said. “It’s an old school mentality with a new school approach, if that makes any sense?”
Absolutely.