It’s a subtle shift, but there’s no question it is happening. The lineup, the banter, the camaraderie already suggest the emergence of a team within a team.
By Opening Day, there could be as many as eight players on the Blue Jays’ 25-man roster who hail from the Dominican Republic, including a top of the batting order that reminds a lot of people of the good old WAMCO days: Jose Reyes, Melky Cabrera, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion.
If this isn’t the most Dominican big-league team of all time, it’s going to be awfully darned close, and that will in part define its character.
Once upon a time in Jays history, such news would not necessarily have been greeted with universal approval. When the franchise under Pat Gillick was one of the first organizations to fully exploit Dominican talent through super scout Epy Guerrero, their failure to win the big one had some pointing fingers.
It was the same familiar, empty gripe that has occasionally been levelled at European players in the NHL and NBA: You don’t want too many of them in your lineup because they do their own thing, because they just don’t care the same way.
That’s a specious argument, and aside from the fact that George Bell had a role in wrecking Jimy Williams’s managerial stint in Toronto — and there’s a case to be made that Williams was the guilty party there — who would really maintain with any credibility that those Jays teams would have been better off without Bell, the 1987 American League MVP, without Alfredo Griffin or Damaso Garcia or Tony Fernandez or Juan Guzman or even Junior Felix?
After Gillick departed, the Jays deemphasized Dominican recruiting, which turned out to be an extraordinarily bad decision — especially given that just about every other major league organization was in the process of doubling down, understanding the wealth of talent, all of it outside the draft.
This season, a country with a population of 10 million will be responsible for about 100 big-league players, more than anywhere outside of the United States, and if you spend time on the island, seeing the game played every day on nearly every available patch of open space, you understand that number is only going to grow.
There’s an ugly underbelly of course: fake birth certificates, corrupt street agents, kids growing up in crushing poverty and Third World conditions chucking any opportunity at an education for the long-shot chance of a signing bonus. When you see those glossy big-league complexes, with manicured lawns and world-class workout facilities, with good food and clean water and classrooms for the chosen few, just a few miles away from streets with open sewers, it’s certainly not difficult to understand the powerful allure.
The Jays, who have their own facility just outside of San Pedro de Macoris, the legendary Bethlehem of shortstops, are playing catch-up these days, though fielding a Dominican super team certainly isn’t going to hurt their reputation on the island.
And on the field, that strong sense of identity figures to be an asset.
It has already provided a comfort zone for the newcomers — especially Cabrera, who, following his drug suspension and subsequent shunning by the San Francisco Giants, was instantly welcomed with open arms into the Blue Jays’ Dominican fold.
The key figure is Bautista, who comes from a different place than almost all of his confrères — he grew up comfortably middle class and was educated in private schools, figuratively a world apart from the shoeless kids using milk cartons for makeshift gloves, or playing the street game vitilla, a baseball precursor, with sticks and bottle caps. He is the undisputed clubhouse leader, he has the ear of GM Alex Anthopoulos, and you can bet that had he been around last September rather than away rehabbing an injury, the Yunel Escobar fiasco would not have played out as it did.
Bautista will tell you now that this is one team with one goal, that there are no cliques, no subdivisions, which is certainly the ideal. But the fact is that most major league clubhouses, however harmonious, including the Jays’ back in the day, are constructed of subsets — young, old, black, white, latino, Japanese — which is simply a function of human nature.
This spring, there has been a running conversation in Spanish in the area around Bautista’s locker. There have been private jokes shared while shagging fly balls. There have been younger players like Emilio Bonifacio and Moises Sierra and Esmil Rogers looking up to their revered elders, to players who are already icons back home, thrilled to be wearing the same uniform.
A little early to be talking about what a World Series parade might look like, snaking through the chaotic streets of Santo Domingo. But understand that these Jays have a second home, a place where this game matters more than anywhere else.