Bautista out of work
Anthopoulos releases former Blue Jays star month before T.O. date
If you bought tickets to the June 19-20 series between the Blue Jays and Braves hoping to welcome Jose Bautista back to Toronto — well, sorry. Atlanta GM Alex Anthopoulos released Joey Bats on Sunday, after 35 at-bats.
It looks like the end of the road for Jose Bautista.
Not a good look for Major League Baseball either, as the two-time home run king appears to have landed on the scrap heap, probably for keeps this time, there joining a bunch of other veterans who got scarcely a sniff on the freeagent market last winter or were out-waited into chintzy contracts.
Atlanta GM Alex Anthopoulos, with whom Bautista has a long and mutually respectful relationship, announced on Sunday morning that the ersatz third baseman had been released.
“We took a shot,” Double-A told reporters. “Certainly (there) was a lot of upside for us if it clicked … We certainly didn’t feel like there was any downside.”
But it was, if not an act of charity (there’s no crying in baseball), a $1-million U.S. experiment that the first-place Braves could no longer justify and money had nothing to do with it, a million a mere financial bagatelle these days. They, unlike Bautista, have roster options.
Which means no sentimental welcome-back salute for Bautista-as-Brave on June 19, with Atlanta making a two-game stop at the Rogers Centre.
In a dozen games with Atlanta, where Bautista signed in midApril following a grim winter of discontent for so many free agents and collusion suspicion by their union, the 37-year-old slashed a meagre .143/.250/.343 with two home runs. He never seemed to find his timing at the plate, an extension of his final season with Toronto in 2017 — worst hitter in baseball, by the stats, with a .203 batting average and 170 strikeouts, but 23 jacks. Which should have drawn some interest in Bautista, if only as a bat off the bench. But, amidst metrics-mania, with managers averse to allowing starters a third exposure to the opposing batting order — and subsequent expanding of the relief corps, extra arms needed to feed the maw of the ’pen — fewer clubs are making room for one-dimensional reserve players and pinch-hitters.
Despite Anthopoulos’s hopes, the righty-hitting Bautista hadn’t done much to help balance out a left-leaning roster. And Bautista, for most of his career an outfielder, hardly distinguished himself shoehorned into third base with the Braves, either, because that’s where they had a need to fill — Johan Camargo going down with a pre-season oblique injury. Camargo, a 24-year-old switch-hitter, is hale now and expected to be Atlanta’s everyday starter at the hot corner. The Braves turned the page. Jose Bautista wafts away like a sheet of crumpled, discarded newspaper.
Unless another team sees a flicker of possibility therein.
Anybody?