Welcome to an especially long Get To Know a Call-Up, since most call-ups don’t have the track record of the newest Atlanta Brave, the man known as “Joey Bats”.
The Player
José Bautista, 3B
Age: 37
Bats: R
2018 Level: AAA Gwinnett
The Results
2018 (AAA): .250/.386/.361 | 1 HR | 1 SB | 13.7% BB | 18.2% K | 123 wRC+
Major League Career: .250/.362/.480 | 331 HR | 66 SB | 14.1% BB | 18.7% K | 127 wRC+
The History
Bautista is a Dominican Republic native who enrolled at Chipola Junior College in Florida at the age of 18 after being underwhelmed by amateur free agent offers. The gambit paid off when the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted Bautista in the 20th round of the 2000 draft two years later.
Bautista and new teammate Dan Winkler will be able to swap crazy Rule V draft stories. Before the 2004 season, Bautista was claimed by the Baltimore Orioles in the Rule V draft, and he made the team out of spring training as a utility infielder. Bautista appeared in 16 games, but was put on waivers when the Orioles needed his roster spot. He was claimed by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who took on Bautista and his Rule V status. After 12 games of .167 batting, the Rays had seen enough and they traded him for cash to the Kansas City Royals. Bautista stayed with the Royals until the trade deadline, when he was part of a complex three-team deal that ended up sending Bautista to Pittsburgh, his original team.
Back in the minors for most of 2005, Bautista started showing flashes of power that would eventually become his calling card, hitting 24 homers between AA and AAA. He won a job with the big league club in 2006 as a super-utility player, and in 2007 he was the primary third baseman for the Pirates and responded with a .254/.339/.414, 15 HR season.
He couldn’t keep up that pace in 2008, and in August the Pirates needed a 40-man roster spot for upcoming prospect Andrew McCutchen and Bautista was placed on waivers, then traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for a player to be named later.
With All-Star Scott Rolen entrenched at third base, Toronto made Bautista a super-utility player again. At the time, Bautista began working diligently with hitting coach Dwyane Murphy to radically alter his swing. When Rolen was traded to the Cincinnati Reds at the trade deadline, Bautista took over at third base and socked 10 home runs in the final 27 games of the season, a prodigious burst of power that went virtually unnoticed on the 75-win 2009 Blue Jays.
Bautista entered the 2010 season with a starting job secured, this time in right field to replace the departed Alex Rios, though he would continue to fill in at third. What followed were six consecutive All-Star seasons, hitting .268/.390/.555 with 227 homer runs, three Silver Slugger Awards, and three top-10 AL MVP finishes. No major leaguer hit more home runs from 2010 through 2017 than José Bautista. The one-two-three punch of sluggers Josh Donaldson, Bautista, and Edwin Encarnacion helped the Blue Jays to back-to-back ALCS appearances in 2015 and 2016.
Bautista hit free agency after the 2016 season, but was unable to find a team willing to invest multiple years in a 36 year old slugger who had demonstrated slowing bat speed and increasingly poor outfield defense. Bautista ended up signing a one-year pillow contract with the Blue Jays for $18 million. While Bautista still slugged 23 home runs in 2017, his batting line fell to .203/.308/.366. Bautista was a on the outside looking in for most of the offseason and was without a contract until his former Blue Jays general manager, Alex Anthopoulos, enticed him minor league contract that would pay him $1 million if he made the major leagues. Bautista has been working in the Braves minor leagues exclusively at third base. Bautista initially struggled with his hitting timing, but over the last six games he has hit .318/.464/.500, apparently good enough to convince both him and the Braves that he is ready for major league pitching.
The Report
Once a dink-and-dunk slap hitting infielder, Bautista radically remade both his swing and his approach after joining the Blue Jays late in the 2009 season. Bautista started his swing earlier, attacking the ball and pulling it for prodigious power. As he has gotten older, his bat has slowed to where he can’t adjust to the flight of the ball as well as in his prime, and in 2017 his strikeout rate creeped over 20% for the first time since his Blue Jay days started. Nevertheless, if he doesn’t get fooled, or is able to guess right on the pitch and location, Bautista can still launch the ball a long way.
Primarily a third baseman coming up through the Pirates system and in his early years, Bautista has been primarily a right fielder since 2010. Never a natural outfielder, Bautista has lost a step (or two or three) over the last several years to the point that he placed 301st out of 309 outfielders in 2017 in StatCast’s Catch Probability metric (but still 9 outs-above-average over last place Matt Kemp). Bautista still has a strong and accurate arm, which should serve him well in his move back to the hot corner. Bautista has shown poor hands and range in his time at third with the Gwinnett Stripers, but he has good reaction times to balls hit near him.
Bautista is known as a showman and is famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for his batflips after hitting home runs. This has lead to more than a few altercations with members of rival teams, including the Atlanta Braves when Bautista homered off Eric O’Flaherty late in the May 17, 2017 game where Freddie Freeman had earlier in the game been hit with a pitch that broke his wrist. Bautista nearly got into physical confrontations with both Jace Peterson and Kurt Suzuki as he rounded the bases.
On the flipside (heh), Bautista has a reputation as a strong clubhouse leader and mentor to younger players, especially fellow Latin American players. One of the players that he helped mature was former Brave Yunel Escobar, a talented shortstop who was traded by the Braves to Toronto in 2010 due to questions about his attitude, focus, and professionalism. Later Bautista would have a similar impact on Edwin Encarnacion after he was dumped by the Cincinnati Reds to the Blue Jays in the Scott Rolen deal.
What’s Next
Bautista will be given a shot to hold down third base for the Braves and provide more power to what has been a surprisingly powerful line-up; the team is tied for 11th in homers in the majors at the time of this writing, and leads all of baseball in slugging percentage. Ryan Flaherty will now be a utility infielder and left-handed pinch hitter, while Johan Camargo will be the primary back-up at shortstop and right-handed pinch hitter. This is an experiment that, if it works, should help balance the lefty-heavy power quotient of the line-up. If Bautista doesn’t end up hitting enough to warrant keeping his glove at third base, Flaherty or Camargo could simply be put back at third and Bautista added to the bench or released. For a pro-rated $1 million, this is a very low-cost move that has the potential for significant dividends.
This is also a move that may partially pay back intangible dividends, getting Bautista around young Latin American starts like Ronald Acuña and Camargo.
The corresponding move to Bautista’s promotion was Preston Tucker being optioned to AAA Gwinnett. I suspect this is a temporary measure, with the team electing to keep infielder Charlie Culberson on the roster for now pending Dansby Swanson‘s wrist injury.
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