Bautista knows there’s something left
“Alex Rios, Vernon Wells, Marco Scutaro, Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Reyes, Brett Lawrie, Ricky Romero, J.P. Arencibia . . . ”
Off the top of his head, Jose Bautista is rattling off the names of teammates he loved.
Perhaps he just hadn’t got to 2017 yet. Perhaps the reporter had stupidly interrupted him in mid flight of reminiscence. Perhaps there’s absolutely no significance that no current teammate makes his Iheart-you list.
Or maybe this season, and all who sailed in her, has left him cold and cored out.
It was a rare moment of reflection on Friday morning at Yankee Stadium that Bautista — on what is likely his final weekend in Toronto threads — allowed a reporter to drag him into the past. He has spent a fortnight or so resisting cheap sentimentality, refusing to indulge in burnished flashes of memory from a 10-year career. Just won’t go there. Not as long as there’s even a wisp of chance that he’ll be back here.
“How can I be reflective when I don’t know what’s going to happen next?” Reporter: Yes you do. Bautista: “No I don’t.’’ Reporter: Yes you do. Bautista: “No I don’t.” Sigh. OK, we’re going to pretend there’s any chance in hell that the Jays will pick up the option on Bautista’s contract.
After what, by nearly all measurement standards, has been the worst season of his major-league life, or at least since days of Pirates and Devil Rays yore. Frankly, he has been a shell of his game-changer self, a downward trajectory that can be traced back to his last genuine lollapalooza moment — a brace of home runs in Game 6 of the 2015 American League Championship Series.
Hubris inflicted by the baseball gods, that so multi-dimensional a slugger-star — hits, runs, RBIs, torque of an arm in the outfield, never mind the league-leading home runs — should be limping to the finish line with a franchise-low batting average and his 1:2 walk-tostrikeout ratio, where it had always been around 1:1. It seems all his attributes, even the perfect pitch vision, are breaking down at once.
It is the way of all flesh: where an individual in any other profession is just hitting his or her prime, the athlete starts hanging on for dear life.
“Every case is different but for the majority, yes, that’s where it is,” Bautista, a month shy of his 37th birthday, acknowledges of that post-35 slippery slope. “But we know where it is. We expect that. And we accept it. Which is a great privilege, to be able to play a sport that you love for a living, make a lot of money in a condensed amount of time, in order for you to retire early, or pursue other things that you want to do in life and have the means to do it.”
Joey Bats is not remotely considering retirement.
He’s got, he believes, some good baseball left in him yet, if apparently not for the Jays.
A one-year contract in the $10million range is reasonable (which is the reporter talking, not Bautista.)
Bautista insists he will recognize decline and this isn’t it.
“If it’s the beginning of a decline, you have to wait till later to know. I’m not a psychic. I can’t predict the future.”
One downbeat season, he maintains, is an anomaly, not a trend.
It’s been eating him, though, this hag of a season, with little comfort to be found in his 23rd jack on Wednesday in Boston.
“It does. It has. Not necessarily because of the personal stats. But being a contributor, feeling like you’re pulling your own weight. And having been able to do it at a certain level for so many years, you’re used to it. All the expectations that come along with it. It’s been tough.
“But stepping back for a minute and looking at everything from the big picture, I think I was a little bit too hard on myself at times, which might have affected me negatively. I’ll do more reflecting on that in the off-season, try not to let it affect me in the same way in the future.”
Internalizing the misery, sounds like, but Bautista won’t elucidate.
“I was pretty spot-on with the words I wanted to use.”
We seem to be doing a coy dance here, Bautista alluding to stuff, talking around it, but not spitting it out.
“Home runs is not the only thing that defines a successful season,” he suddenly declares, waving off those 23 long balls. “Neither are strikeouts or base hits or batting average. Contributing to daily wins is what I take pride in. We all want to be the guy that comes up there with the game on line.’’
He’d underlined those occasions countless times in the past, with the swagger of towering self-confidence. Now: the pop-up, the strikeout, the double-play groundout.
“There’s no explanation for what happened this year,” says Bautista stubbornly. “Am I the only person who’s had a down year, regardless of age?’’
Do not — repeat, do not — suggest to Bautista that his bat speed has slowed fractionally, that he’s not catching up to fastballs and, since at least last year’s playoffs against Cleveland, he has been jammed by breaking balls.
“It has nothing to do with bat speed. Whoever believes that, I’m so sad for them.”
Besides, he adds, a new team kicking his tires won’t be scrutinizing stats. Which seem a really weird thing to say in a stats-obsessed sport like baseball.
“They aren’t the only determinant,” he says. “It’s about ability, health, mindset, persistence. Just because you’re capable of doing something and you don’t do it today doesn’t mean that you can’t do it tomorrow. People know what I can bring to the table.”
So, a team won’t ask what does Jose have left? He shakes his head in exasperation.
“The answer is not where you think it might be, looking for it.’’
This conversation is getting too Zen for a dumb reporter. Can’t we just play My Favourite Jay Moments?
And now he Bautista does smile, if wearily.
“The best ones are pretty obvious and everybody can pick them out.
“I remember all of them.”