All the right things fell into place for Bautista's success this season.
I guess when you’ve been sitting in the broadcast booth for as long as I have, you get to see things you never thought you’d see. At the top of that list: Jose Bautista becoming the first Blue Jay to hit 50 home runs in a season.
You might remember that back in the spring, the plan was to have Bautista bat lead-off. That’s where he hit during the Grapefruit League games and he was quite successful, hitting a robust .439 with 9 doubles, 5 HR and 11 RBI in 18 games.
But once the regular season began, that plan lasted just a dozen games with Bautista hitting only .163 with more strikeouts (12) than hits (7). His poor performance mirrored the team’s, who were hitting a collective .230.
But a transaction made by Alex Anthopoulos set things in motion to kick start Bautista’s ascension, to the top of the home run hitter’s hill.On April 15th, a minor deal was struck that certainly didn’t make any of the contenders sit up and take notice.
For future considerations (ultimately $75,000) the Jays received outfielder Fred Lewis from the San Francisco Giants. A couple of days after arriving, Lewis was placed into the lead-off spot, giving the team an injection of speed from the left side of the plate.
Bautista was sent down to the 7-hole to regain the stroke that made him a monster in the spring. Now down in the order and not expected to set the table for the middle of the order, the home runs started coming, 10 in the 26 games hitting seventh.
But then the pieces started to shift again when Aaron Hill and Adam Lind, both coming off breakout seasons a year ago, both found themselves in prolonged slumps, reflecting the team’s inability to do anything except hit home runs and strike out.
That was when Cito Gaston decided to shake up the middle of the line-up, moving Lind and Hill down and Bautista up, finally settling him into the 3-spot, and seeing more fastballs in front of a healthy and rejuvenated Vernon Wells.
The rest, as they say, is history.
In the 83 games hitting third, Bautista has blasted 31 home runs, at an incredible rate of one every 9.8 at-bats. For this season, at least, he is the most prolific home run hitter in the game, and one whose name comes up all over the sports talk radio shows on satellite.
I can personally state, I never thought Bautista was an everyday player. A quick glance through his career stats showed that before his trade to the Blue Jays in late August of 2008 from the Pirates, he was nothing more than a utility player with slightly better than average power and solid defensive skills.
But when he arrived in Toronto and placed before the watchful eyes of Cito Gaston and hitting coach Gene Tenace, both just over two months from being rehired, Bautista started reworking his swing under two ‘old school’ hitting instructors. He had a big fan in Cito, who immediately saw the potential in Bautista that the Orioles, Rays, Royals and Pirates – teams that had given up on him since coming to the Majors in 2004 – hadn’t. His new manager did whatever he could to get him in the line-up somewhere.
The results didn’t come instantly, leading to my own ambivalence about whether he was an everyday player, but once again, we shouldn’t have scoffed at Cito’s judgement. After all, it was Cito who helped transform Devon White into a key cog on the World Series teams after The Angels, specifically then-manager Doug Rader, ran him out of town. I think he knows a good player when he sees one.
Late last season, under the tutelage of new hitting coach Dwayne Murphy, a slight change in his swing, exchanging a looping pass at the ball for a direct, straight-through-the-ball swing, resulted in a Major League-best 10 home runs after the first of September and provided a sneak preview of his monster 2010 season.
12 home runs in both May and August, combined with 11 in July, put Bautista in the position to shoot for 50 home runs heading into the final month of the season, still a plateau that only 25 hitters before had attained.
But on a cloudy first day of autumn, in front of a customary crowd of around 12,000 at the Rogers Centre, Bautista took a Felix Hernandez offering and hit No. 50, a towering fly ball that landed at the feet of his reliever team mates in the Jays bullpen.
Too bad more weren’t there to witness it, but that’s their loss.
And with that, Jose Bautista’s name joins a list of the "who’s-who" of home runs hitters, including Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg and Ken Griffey Jr., legends of the game.
That alone should make all Canadian baseball fans stand a little taller.
It also adds another great chapter to the rich history of the Toronto Blue Jays.
