Rosie DiManno
Joey Bats exits after Game 5 letdown with no guarantees
Bautista, Jays head into uncertain future,
He was the last Toronto Blue Jay off the field. The last to register a hit. The last man standing on base — arriving on the stroke of a bottom-of-the-ninth leadoff double.
And perhaps the first to find himself sundered from this franchise, when the dust of playoff elimination settles. When the club moves on to become whatever the tall foreheads decide it needs to be — younger, quicker, severed from a recent past that ended too far short again in the present, a meek 3-0 white flag.
But Jose Bautista, the consummate Jay these past eight-plus years, heard you as he walked, head down, to the dugout and an unclear future.
Heard you also on the full-count at-bat that brought nearly 50,000 to their feet. “It was nice. It was appreciated.” A sellout crowd at the Rogers Centre, cheering for all those seasons of Bautista excellence — if not so much this one — and the slugging laurels and acutely distinct personality, where professional athletes are so often banal and leery of saying anything controversial or showing the truth about themselves.
Bautista went out — if this is the leaving part — as a pending free agent with little indication from management that they have interest in re-signing the yesterdayturned-36-year-old, though surely to heaven they’ll at least tender a qualifying offer.
Not remotely amused that the final time he stepped into the batter’s box, some dimwit charged the field, requiring a tackle takedown by security.
“Not necessarily what I wanted right there.’’
He was standing up against the “talking pillar” in the Toronto clubhouse, where on so many nights reporters have waited and waited and waited for Bautista to show.
On this evening, however, with the season crashing down on a four-gamesto-one Indians triumph in the American League Championship Series, it was Bautista who had been waiting for the mob to descend.
The proud Latino had inserted himself into the narrative of the series in its final writhing hours, with signature sass and verbal strut, tweaking the designated Game 5 starter, Ryan Merritt, who’d been out in the Arizona instructional league just a week ago. Summoned as an emergency replacement as yet another moundsman from the rotation went down in an injury heap. Merritt, who had all of 11 innings pitched and one starting assignment on his major league resume.
Yeah, Bautista had some cracking-wise fun with the poor scrubeenie’s predicament; that the kid would be “shaking in his boots” pondering Toronto’s potent lineup.
Of course, Kid Merritt got the last laugh, inducing a ground-ball out and fly ball from Bautista on the two at-bats in which they faced each other.
“There was never any disrespect meant,’’ Bautista said quietly. “I simply gave my opinion on what I thought could happen. I never said that he wasn’t good enough.
“I also stated that those types of matchups can go either way. Sometimes people step up to the occasion and he certainly pitched tremendously.”
That was pretty much all Bautista wanted to get on the record in a locker room where teammates were already hugging each other goodbye, not knowing if they’d ever share these quarters together again. No matter how often the question was posed to Bautista, or how it was angled, he refused to go there — to what comes next.
“I don’t want you guys to think that I’m being stubborn. I just don’t think it’s the right time to be talking about that. We just battled through a tough series. There’s a lot of stuff in here. I don’t want to make this about myself. And I don’t really feel I’m in a proper state of mind to be talking about that.
“I know it’s a possibility. We’ll see what happens.”
I think we’ve already seen what will happen.
No point, though, suggesting Bautista hubris — his mocking of Merritt — was precisely the nosethumbing that got under Cleveland’s schnozz, a tempting of fate and displeasing to the gods of baseball. As if Bautista took down the Jays with his gall and disdain. A fairer knock on the two-time batting champion would be his 3-for-18 acquittal at the plate.
“Individually, as it pertains to myself, I know that I’m capable of doing a lot more,” said Bautista, though unlikely for this team, ever again. “It was tough. They seemed to make the right pitches at the right time and got us out. They never let us string hits together and when we had men in scoring position they seemed to turn it up to another level of execution. Again, hats off to them.’’
But they just about all stopped hitting, except for Josh Donaldson and Ezequiel Carrera, discombobulated by Cleveland’s pitching.
And so we watched, on Wednesday, with a sense of inevitability as Cleveland went out early, then further out, then further out, as Toronto starter Marco Estrada committed some early-inning errors while his teammates failed once more to provide him with any run support — 14 Estrada innings in this series, zero runs.
We watched, too, as Edwin Encarnacion — who might be just as gone as compatriot Bautista — struck out looking, hit into a double play, flied out and struck out swinging in maybe the last at-bat for him, too, another free agent who, if not re-signed, if not offered the enriching new contract he merits, will prove beyond dispute that the Mark Shapiro regime is both cheap and stupid.
But oh, it ended with such a whimper, under a sealed dome that should have been open to the mild autumn weather.
A season of magical thinking faded to pinpricks of harsh realism. The pallor of the Blue Jays: wan. Because they really did believe themselves World Series destined. Because of the false hope, perhaps the foolishness, engendered by an emphatic Game 4 win on Tuesday, leading many to believe — though they might deny it now — that the Jays were entirely capable of reversing this thing on a dime.
They couldn’t. They didn’t. Instead, it was the Indians out there, celebrating on Toronto turf.
Bautista: “I wanted to be on a plane to Cleveland.”
“We just battled through a tough series. There’s a lot of stuff in here. I don’t want to make this about myself.” JOSE BAUTISTA ON HIS BLUE JAY FUTURE