At 28, Rasmus still trying to unlock great potential

Jays outfielder an impending free agent

They call it the “walk year,” the season when a player is bound for free agency. The greater a player’s production in a walk year, the greater the payoff when he walks.

Colby Rasmus is crawling through his walk year.

Last year Rasmus ran. For the first time since joining the Toronto Blue Jays in a 2011 trade, he posted a batting average (.276) and OPS (.840) that suggested he was rounding out his résumé, which had previously featured home runs, good defence in centre field and, yes, a boatload of strikeouts.

He appeared to have turned a corner in a troubled career. But now, with almost threequarters of the 2014 season gone, Rasmus needs a minor miracle to curb renewed skepticism about his value. Entering Monday’s action, his slash line was .220/.286/.440. The resulting .725 OPS, together with a career-high strikeout rate of 32%, will not tempt teams to offer the rich, multi-year contract he seemed poised to attract after last season.

His departure from Toronto appears inevitable. The Jays cannot risk him accepting the US$15-million qualifying offer required to collect a compensatory draft choice if he leaves. And while he remains silent on the subject, he may have had enough of the Blue Jays.

“It’s been a rough year,” he says. “But I’ve had a lot of rough years and I’m still standing, so I’m happy about that.”

There have been moments, as recently as during Sunday’s 19-inning win over the Tigers, when his extraordinary athleticism startles those who have watched him struggle through the current season. “We know it’s in there,” manager John Gibbons often says of a player with high-ceiling potential, and the cliché certainly applies to Rasmus, who turned 28 on Monday.

Against the Tigers, for example, he singled to advance a seventh-inning rally, doubled to the wall in right-centre field in the 15th and, most memorably, made two game-saving catches in the 18th and 19th, one with a leap against the wall, the other with a dive to snatch a liner away from the turf. When Rasmus refers to surviving “a lot of rough years,” one cannot help but think of his well-documented struggles in St. Louis at age 22 and 23, a kid in a veteran clubhouse under Tony La Russa, where the manager and older players alike tried to drill “toughness” into the quiet, poker-faced rookie. That experience was complicated by Rasmus’s father, Tony, who had been a hard-driving coach to his kids and who, after Colby was called up to the Cardinals, continued to work with his son as a hitting tutor.

Last week, Tony Rasmus gave a radio interview in which he blamed the Cardinals for changing Colby for the worse, criticized his son for failing “to make the adjustments that he needed to make” this year, and called Colby’s pregnant wife “an obstacle” when she accompanies Colby on road trips.

Colby Rasmus said he did not wish to comment on his father’s latest remarks. But in occasional public comments over his time with the Jays, he has made it clear that he is tired of his father’s intrusions and at one point two years ago said he had asked his dad to back off. So it is clear the two Tonys have left some scars. But last season, Rasmus developed a comfortable working relationship with then-hitting coach Chad Mottola. They concluded that Rasmus was a better hitter when took his stance with his hands extended in front of him. This year, new hitting coach Kevin Seitzer suggested early on that he move his hands higher and closer to his body, the better to handle a variety of pitches and use the whole field.

Rasmus did not feel comfortable with the change. While he and Seitzer disagree, there is no animosity.

“Last year with [Mottola], I pushed my hands out a little further and I started closing my body off more to try to keep my front hip closed, and that got my hands working good,” Rasmus says. “The key is getting your hips and your hands coming through together. That’s where your power’s going to be from, because it starts with your legs and your bottom half and then your core, and then that brings your hands through like a whip to give you some sock. So I feel like with my hands out like that, and I close my body off, then my hands are freed up.”

Always a pull hitter, Rasmus says that stance helped him hit more balls up the middle and to left, his opposite field, last year.

Statistics recording his basehit location show little difference between this year and last. According to Baseball-Reference.com, about half of his hits went to the middle of the field both years, with just under 50% going to right. Over the two years, he has 10 hits to the left side. After a slow start, Rasmus missed five weeks with a hamstring injury, and at the all-star break was batting .212. Since then he has hit .241 and feels he is making more consistent contact.

But teams typically play him in a prominent shift to the right side. Pitchers feed his pull-side habit by throwing him inside fastballs and off-speed pitches on the plate.

“The shift has been tough, and they’ve pitched me well into the shift,” he says.

Still, he maintains that his stance is right for him. It worked last year. He is confident it will work again.

As for free agency, he insists he is not worried.

“I would be if I hadn’t been trying and working,” he says. “I’ve been trying, and keeping myself in good shape. I haven’t let down and given up. ... Making the $150-million deal or whatever, and all that stuff, that’d be a blessing. But if it isn’t meant to be, it isn’t meant to be.”