Blue Jays need to re-sign Bautista, or be prepared to rebuild.
The thing is, this would have been a tough one for Alex Anthopoulos to sort out.
The new management at the Toronto Blue Jays has been met with a lot of skepticism, in this corner and others, for some valid reasons. The departure of the former GM was just the first of them, but the generally uninspiring off- season and the constant threat of Rogers-related frugality have given Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins a lot of work to do as they try to convince fans that last season’s exuberant madness wasn’t just a mirage.
But t he pending f r ee agency of Jose Bautista, and to a lesser extent Edwin Encarnacion, was never going to be a simple problem to solve, unless the players themselves chose to make it easy. Which, in Bautista’s case at least, they have not.
How much do you pay a 35- year- old slugger who is, at the moment, one of the premier power hitters in the game? That question alone is tricky because Bautista blossomed late — he was just a random guy until he became a monstrous threat at age 29 — and so there is almost no one comparable among his peers. Other power hitters typically hit the f ree agency years in their late 20s with a proven resume and many years left to play. A team pays big for a few years of similar production and knows going in that it will see a lot less value in the deal in the declining years: Albert Pujols, Mark Teixeira, Adrian Gonzalez.
But Bautista is both looking for a big raise from his $14-million salary and about to hit the years in which his production could be expected to drop off, and possibly precipitously. Leaving aside any talk of Toronto’s payroll limits, is it prudent to commit, say, $20 million per season for five years to someone who has already had his best days?
Even if the Blue Jays did have some leeway to boost their payroll significantly from where it presently sits at 14th- highest in the majors, one could argue that tying up a big chunk of it for the twilight of Jose Bautista would be a decision made mostly for feel-good reasons instead of baseball ones. Among the 22 position players who make more than $20 million annually, I count six — Miguel Cabrera, Giancarlo Stanton, Mike Trout, Chris Davis, Joey Votto and Jason Heyward — whose teams wouldn’t look at those contracts today with something between fi ngers crossed ( Yoenis Cespedes), regret ( Carl Crawford) or dread (Ryan Howard).
But then there is that part about Bautista having no comparables. He had some injury problems in 2012 and 2013, but has completed two full seasons of more than 150 games each. He takes conditioning extraordinarily seriously and appears to be uniquely in tune with his body.
There is also the part about his production.
In the past six seasons, Bautista has four times been in the top 10 in major-league OPS+, a measure that combines on- base percentage and power, while adjusting for park effects and league. His only two misses were the years in which he was hurt for an extended period. Over that same stretch of six seasons, only two players, Cabrera ( five) and Votto ( four), have been in the top ten in major- league OPS+ as often as Bautista. And, as probably goes without say- ing, the list of players who finish that high is full of guys making exorbitant amounts of money. Cabrera is making $ 31 million this year. Stanton, fifth in OPS+ in 2014 and otherwise never in the top ten, is making $ 25 million. Gonzalez, seventh in OPS+ in 2010 and 2011 and not near that level any year since, is making $22 million.
Is Bautista correct to believe he would get a huge raise on the open market? He absolutely is.
But the biggest reason to try to extend his contract is this: what are the Blue Jays without him? When the team passed on making a big- dollar bid for David Price, it was justified in part because the offence was so good that decent, cheaper pitching would suffice. But Bautista and Encarnacion, batting third and fourth, are obviously huge parts of that. If they go, then the lineup gets a lot less fearsome in a hurry. The competitive window would be closed. And Shapiro and Atkins would be straight into something approaching a rebuild. Is that really what they came here to do?
It sounds crazy, any time you talk about a nine- figure contract for an athlete, I know. But this team, and these owners, gave Vernon Wells $ 126 million in 2007, back when that was an awful lot of money in baseball terms. It would seem much more likely to work out better this time.