Jose Bautista’s bad start

The 2017 Major League Baseball season has been fairly forgettable for Jose Bautista.

The Toronto Blue Jays’ slugger isn’t slugging. On average, he is striking out more than once per game. His batting average needs a boost to hit .200 and his home run total needs more than a good pair of prescription glasses to see.

Things have been bad. Former teammate R.A. Dickey had more RBIs than Bautista through nearly three weeks of the season. And with three, Dickey was two RBIs shy of his career best.

But, anyone who has made some sort of noise in disgust while watching Bautista strike out, ground out, fly out or foul out, needs to step into his shoes for a moment.

Most recently, he has worn New Balance and Reebok cleats.

Bautista can be called a slow starter. There is documented statistical history. You can point to months of it in 2016 that wound up being compounded by injuries. In 2015, Bautista’s April average was awful. He hit .164, but had five home runs. (.164/.325/.443 overall in his first month).

But you can cover yourself in baseball’s advanced metrics and statistics, and really not come up with the a very likely reason for where the three-time Silver Slugger sits.

That’s why you need his shoes.

Think about the end to Bautista’s season. Not the ALCS against Cleveland. Outside of Game 4, every Blue Jay bat struggled to get to Cleveland’s pitching. Think about where Bautista’s mind must have been going into the off-season.

Free Agent. Six-time all-star. Led league in home runs twice. Key catalyst on a team that reached ALCS in back-to-back seasons.

If baseball was NASA, a resume like that would get you a shot at a Mars mission.

And that is almost surely where Bautista thought his new contract would take him. He was expecting a rocket ship ride into the stars. What he got was an aborted launch.

On Nov. 3, Bautista became a free agent. On Nov. 14, he had yet to accept Toronto’s qualifying offer and hit the open market.

On Jan. 18, Bautista re-signed with the Blue Jays for slightly more than the original qualifying offer that the Jays decided to provide.

It was a deal that seemed to add more money to say “thank you” to one of the team’s longest-serving stars to lessen the humiliation of vanished expectations.

A 36-year-old ball player has no reason to think that a huge windfall is a guarantee.

We really don’t know what Bautista was looking for or what may have been offered, but it would seem pretty certain that things didn’t go as hoped.

And that leads us to the Jose Bautista of early 2017.

USA Today once called the art of hitting a baseball the hardest thing to do in professional sports.

For any athlete to do anything in professional sports, they generally need otherworldly athleticism coupled with a strong belief in their abilities.

There is a reason egos run rampant.

Lose that inner confidence or have it rocked in some fashion and you create a big roadblock.

Former Major League pitcher, Rick Ankiel has just released a new book entitled, “The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life.”

He details how the way a player feels, translates to the way he plays.

Bautista took a hit in the off-season.

His own image of himself was shredded in the meat grinder that free agency can often be.

Not everyone can play in the NBA and have Mike Conley’s good fortune.

Does a guy making $18 million a year deserve a little wiggle room to get himself back on track?

Many fans will tell you “no.”

But, they have to understand the hit Bautista took, not in the wallet, but between his ears.

Bautista can easily work through this. He knows what it feels like to be in a groove. He knows the look of that baseball when it appears to be two sizes larger and the feel when it connects perfectly off a sweet swing.

There are grooves to be had. Bautista is 36, but he is only 36.

Time really doesn’t heal all wounds, but the gash in Bautista’s stats is not a huge one. It’s less than a month long. Hardly a need for stitches or even surgical tape.

Bautista simply has to come to terms with what his career is and not what he likely thought it was going to be.