Former Toronto Blue Jays player Jose Bautista outside the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse entrance at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, on Aug. 11.Nick Turchiaro/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
In a small ceremony on Friday, the Jays signed a one-day contract with Jose Bautista. On Saturday, he will retire a Toronto Blue Jay.
This was news to a lot of people who thought Bautista retired years ago. That’s usually how it works when you don’t play baseball any more – you are retired from it.
But hope springs eternal in the hearts of men who work out for a living. On that tip, Bautista looks amazing. Same Damian Warner physique, same Fred Flintstone beard.
But there was something different. It took you a while to figure out what it was – Bautista was smiling. Not smirking, or showing you his bottom teeth as a warning that if you keep walking toward my locker horrible things will happen, but smiling. I don’t remember seeing that before. It doesn’t suit him.
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Team president Mark Shapiro was the MC. He praised Bautista as a sort of Faulkner of baseball – “It really wasn’t a game for Jose, it was a craft.”
He put a new-school powder-blue jersey on Bautista.
“We gotta get him in the new blue since he never wore it,” Shapiro said, which is a strange sentence coming from the guy who ensured he never got a chance. Bautista smiled again. It looked like it hurt.
But this is the up-is-down world of Toronto sports. You resented us and we didn’t like you and now it’s okay because in this town everybody forgets everything eventually. The really important thing – we all made some money together.
When people think of Bautista now, they remember the bat flip. Kawhi Leonard aside, it is the high-water mark of Toronto sports in this century. Which, when you think about it, is not something you want to go around shouting about.
The Bautista moment that’s still resonating today happened a couple of years later, at spring training. His contract was coming up and he didn’t feel like negotiating. Instead, Bautista made a whimsical dollar demand and then took his grievances to the media.
Scrums are pointless, but this one was the reason they still do them – because every once in a while, the scrumee wigs out.
For 20 minutes, Bautista wove the most ornate of his many rhetorical daisy chains. Every question was answered with another question. The answer to that question was another question. You don’t often get to see an all-star athlete weaponize the Socratic method.
Bautista seemed to suggest that he, personally, was the reason club-owner Rogers Inc.’s share price rose 10 per cent during the bat-flip period.
“Are they going to put it out in the media that, because of the Jays, we made all this money? No,” Bautista said. “Everybody can read between the lines.”
Except they couldn’t.
“They either meet [my price], or it is what it is,” Bautista said.
And so it was what it was. Bautista wasn’t run out of town. It wasn’t angry like that. It was more a letdown. Bautista became what every Toronto great becomes – a human widget that no longer fits inside the machine. A surplus part.
Not even 10 years later, bygones are bygones. He’ll join the Level of Excellence in a ceremony before Saturday’s game.
“We had great teams and I was just one of the guys,” Bautista said.
Who is this person? Because it’s no longer the one who once refused to drink from a water fountain at spring training because “thoroughbreds” do not “drink from a trough.” This is some other guy.
There is no arguing that Bautista represents quality and resilience. He is the minor-league scrub who became a big-league prince.
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And that swagger. Bautista was one of those people who can be coming into a room for 15 minutes. He demanded your attention, even when he was just sitting there doing nothing.
But if we’re speaking of Jose Bautista the idea rather than Jose Bautista the person, what he represents in this city isn’t excellence. It’s disappointment. He is the 21st-century Toronto athlete par excellence in that all that ability and charisma were for naught in the end.
Seeing him now isn’t celebratory. It’s wistful. It conjures a long series of what ifs? What if the Jays had moved earlier to take advantage of Bautista’s best-in-baseball seasons? What if they’d pushed through in 2015? What if ownership hadn’t decided that a profound change in executive direction was a great idea in the midst of the team’s best run since the early 1990s? What if future World Series champion Alex Anthopoulos hadn’t been run out of town, soon to be followed by most of the players, executives and coaches who’d defined his tenure?
Mostly, what if this town knew how to take advantage of its all-timers?
How many grand legacies have been frittered away in the past couple of decades? You could start a formidable list – Bautista, Josh Donaldson, Roy Halladay, Carlos Delgado, Mats Sundin, Doug Gilmour, Curtis Joseph, Vince Carter, etc., etc. Even Leonard belongs on that list – he came through, but then pulled the chute as soon as he had an excuse. On a long list of local sports casualties, he is a conscientious objector.
Those are the players lost. Then there are the losses to come. Does it feel to you like the current generation of Toronto stars will make their most lasting mark here? Or does it feel like Auston Matthews and Vlad Guerrero will be back in 10 or 15 years getting their name on some plaque and talking about how much Toronto once meant to them, a whole lifetime ago? Because I’m leaning the second way.
These teams are never short on talent. They are terminally lacking in follow-through. They are fatally undermined by a collective acceptance of mediocrity.
Just a little, just a taste – that’s good enough. Give them one bat flip every 10 or 20 years and they’ll keep showing up.
And then eventually, after they’ve lost their will to argue, after they’ve run out of invites elsewhere, the players themselves will come back to tell you how amazing it was.
Business-wise, it’s a great formula. Closing the circle. Making people feel great about how poorly it turned out and how badly it ended.
“This way, the fans can have their moment, too,” Bautista said of Saturday’s pregame festivities.
I’m sure it will be a moment of fond nostalgia for everyone in the room. Bautista certainly earned one last hurrah. But wouldn’t it have been better seven or eight years ago, when it mattered?