José Bautista Was Baseball’s Greatest Late Bloomer
José Bautista Was Baseball’s Greatest Late Bloomer
Nobody in MLB history has ever turned from a journeyman into a superstar quite like Joey Bats.
José Bautista’s MLB career will be remembered for a handful of indelible moments, chief among them his brawl with Rougned Odor and the bat flip heard ’round the world against the Texas Rangers during Game 5 of the 2015 ALDS.
But now that Bautista has officially retired 1,777 days after his last big-league at bat, he should also be remembered for how he carved out a career path like no other in baseball. He was the greatest late bloomer in MLB history, with no player before, since or perhaps ever again reinventing himself from a quintessential journeyman to a bona fide superstar.
From age 23 to 27, Bautista was a light-hitting infielder struggling to keep a major league job. From 28 to 34, Bautista was one of the most feared sluggers on the planet. It was as if he became an entirely new player, his transformation from Regular Joe to Joey Bats forcing us to give him his due respect and at least consider the idea of Cooperstown.
But like all fairy tales, let’s start with once upon a time . . .
In 2004, Bautista’s big-league career began much like you might expect from a player drafted in the 20th round: He was selected off waivers, then acquired for cash and traded two other times, making him only the 20th player in modern history (since 1901) to play for four or more different teams in the same season. (Of those, he was also only the third to post negative Wins Above Replacement at each stop.) It was an inauspicious start and a harbinger of how the early phase of Bautista’s career would go.
As a rookie with those four teams — the Orioles, Devil Rays, Royals and Pirates — Bautista hit just .205 with a .502 OPS while playing a mix of third and the outfield. He didn’t latch on with Pittsburgh’s big-league club the following season, playing just 11 games (though he hit well in the minors and was selected for the 2005 All-Star Futures Game).
When Bautista got his first real shot as an everyday major leaguer in 2006, he was somewhere between awful and dreadful. With a subpar OPS and some of the worst defensive metrics in baseball, Bautista was the seventh-least valuable player in the league by WAR, checking in at 1.1 wins worse than a replacement-level alternative.
Bautista would prove to be better than that over the next few seasons, but not by much. While his ability to move around multiple positions made him useful to keep around, he wasn’t on a trajectory for anything more than nomadic cups of coffee.
In August 2008, the Pirates shipped him to Toronto for a player to be named later — and it’s hard even now to see what the Blue Jays saw then. Through the end of his age-27 season ( the one you’re supposed to peak in), Bautista’s career stats looked like this: 462 games, 46 home runs — never more than 16 in a season — a .239 average, a .722 OPS (11% worse than average) and -2.2 WAR.
All of that, however, merely set the stage for the greatest career turnaround in baseball history.
It started off modestly enough. Bautista hit just 13 home runs in 113 games for the Blue Jays in 2009, though he did so while raising his OPS to .757 and dramatically improving his defense, which was now worth +10 runs compared with an average fielder at his various positions. As a result, Bautista posted a respectable career-high 2.4 WAR, finally putting him above the zero mark for his career overall.
And then Bautista morphed into Joey Bats.
Bautista’s 2010 campaign is the kind of season players dream about. He had 16 home runs by the end of May; after a June lull, he blasted 11 homers in July, 12 in August and another 11 in September. By the end of the year, Bautista had a staggering 54 home runs — 12 more than any other hitter that year and — most notably — 38 more than his previous career high in a season. That’s still the largest leap over a player’s previous high-water mark in MLB history, among those with at least 200 career games before their huge HR season.
What turned Bautista’s career around? He gave credit to Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston and hitting coach Dwayne Murphy for helping transform his swing from long and late to short, direct and deadly. They encouraged Bautista to start his swing early — “earlier than earlier,” as teammate Vernon Wells put it — with the help of a pronounced leg kick for timing. The results were apparent as soon as Sept. 2009, when Bautista had 10 home runs, the most he had ever hit in any month as a big leaguer, and he never looked back.
Because of his abrupt power surge, Bautista worried about speculation that steroids were fueling his mid-career turnaround — concerns that he addressed publicly in a 2016 Sports Illustrated feature story. But looking back, Bautista was in many ways an early prototype for baseball’s MVP Machine generation, the group of 2010s sluggers that later included Justin Turner, J.D. Martinez and Josh Donaldson, all of whom focused on new stats such as launch angle in order to perfect their swings and gain more power at the plate.
We don’t know what Bautista’s launch angle was when he made his big leap to stardom in 2010; Statcast data wouldn’t come into the picture until 2015. But we do know that his rate of fly balls per batted ball went from being 14% above league average through 2009 to 43% above average in 2010, and 30% above average from that moment onward. Long before “elevate and celebrate” became a mantra across MLB clubhouses, Bautista was studiously applying its lessons.
Of course, it was fair to wonder whether Bautista would fall back to earth following that seemingly out-of-nowhere 2010 campaign. The concept of regression to the mean was practically made for guys who go from 13 homers to 54 in consecutive seasons. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Bautista is that he was far from a one-year wonder.
No, he didn’t crack 50 again in 2011 — but nobody in MLB did. All Bautista did that year was hit 43 home runs, which again led all of baseball, and he did it with an even better OPS (1.056) and more WAR (8.2). He went from fourth in AL MVP voting to third.
Those 2010 and 2011 seasons were the beginning of a stretch of six consecutive years during which Bautista produced 34.2 total WAR. Since 1901, only 108 batters have had a better run of six straight seasons than Bautista’s peak; he produced roughly the same peak value as Hall of Famers Ryne Sandberg, Joe Medwick, Paul Waner, Tony Perez and Al Kaline, just to name a few. And nobody in that stratosphere of players gave fewer clues than Bautista about their coming stardom.
The numbers prove it out: Among batters who ended up producing at least 30 career WAR, none had less production through their age-27 season than Bautista’s -2.2 WAR before he began his star turn.
The decade that followed Bautista’s breakout saw him hit nearly 300 home runs, with plenty of his signature bat-flipping swagger. It also set the stage for a Cooperstown debate, which can finally be had now that Bautista has filed the official paperwork on his retirement.
In the camp of "wonder if": Joey Bats was the kind of feared slugger who passed the eye test, forcing you to stop whatever you were doing and watch him hit. In the camp of "if only": If only he had figured it out earlier and amassed better numbers.
Plenty of MLB stars had similar peaks but didn’t become Hall of Famers, including Kenny Lofton, George Foster, Keith Hernandez, Evan Longoria and Nomar Garciaparra.
You can make the argument that Bautista’s period of dominance started too late and was over too soon to truly warrant enshrinement. But given the way his career started, the fact that he even had such a period of dominance at all makes him one of baseball’s unicorns.
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