Jose Bautista and Podzilla? Alex Anthopolous, you are dangerously close to becoming my everything.

I don't know this for sure, but I bet Jose hit the shit out of that one.

This is great.  I feel awesome about this.  The low-risk, low-reward thing for Alex Anthopolous to do with the Jose Bautista contract situation would have been to take whatever decision was handed down in arbitration, and just go with that.  If he went ahead and had another amazing year, Bautista would be dozens of millions of dollars more costly than he is right now, and Anthopolous could have traded him to a contender at the deadline or taken the picks and nobody would have minded all that much. Conversely, if Bautista statistically fell off a cliff, Anthopolous would be applauded for having played it safe.  And yeah, either way that would have been safe, and ultimately fine, but this is way, way better.

Bautista is of course a weird, weird case, a guy who bounced around and didn't do much of anything until the last month of his age 29 season, and then, after identifying and working through some pretty serious mechanical flaws in his swing with coach Dwayne Murphy, flaws that had caused him to be late on virtually everything and foul off an unusual number of hittable pitches, he put it all together.  (You can read about that process in Sports Illustrated, and there actually used to be pictures, maybe just in the print version, that show the dramatic difference in his swing.)  And then, after an awesome September, 2009, and absolutely monstrous 2010 in which he slugged 54 home runs (.260/.378/.617, 6.9 WAR, omg, wtf).   Albert Pujols (and holy cow, what's going on in St. Louis? isn't that nuts?) hit 42, and sixteen players hit in the 30s.  As Neil and I got all emotional about in the comments to the Hank Greenberg post, we've moved into an era where 50 home runs is genuinely awesome again, and not just, like, pretty cool. And so 54 is once again truly rad.

Also let me say here that if you want to be all "lol steroids" on the subject of Jose Bautista, you can pretty much go to hell.  Bautista has himself been pretty reasonable when people have brought this up, adopting a very patient "I can see why you would ask that, but I assure you this is not the case" approach.  And reporters, particularly the loathsome Damien Cox in a piece called "Gotta At Least Ask the Question", have been so horseshit about it, with the kind of "I'm not saying, I just think it's important that we think about it" stance where they don't dare make an accusation, exactly, but deride anyone naive enough to not make an accusation.  Do they think that (a) performance enhancing drugs are completely out of the game except for those supposedly used by Jose Bautista, which explains his monster year relative to an otherwise clean league, or that (b) steroid use is still rampant but Jose Bautista has happened upon some kind of megasteroid previously unknown to athletics or even science and so has lapped the field?  In the absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, it's just so lame to chalk Jose Bautista's 2010 up to steroids amirite? as though that is the only way to explain it.  (Read the Mitchell Report and be dazzled by the raw power numbers of those named. Dazzled!)  I think Keith Law had the best response to the whole "don't you think we need to ask the question?" thing last year when he said something like this to John Shannon (that guy is the worst, by the way) on the Fan 590 in Toronto: "It's not actually fair, in fact it is completely unfair, because what if I were to ask you, 'John Shannon, are you a horrible racist?  I'm not saying there's any reasonable evidence to support it, I just think it's important to ask the question.' I've just called you a racist in the most cowardly way possible."  I am quoting from memory and probably being meaner to John Shannon than Keith Law was, but not by much.

In the event that Bautista gets popped for fifty games, you can bring this all back up with me, and I will not feel like I need to correct myself or anything.  Could he be on steroids?  Well yeah, sure, why not, who couldn't? But is a monstrous breakout season like his 2010 strong enough evidence on its own to even suggest that it's likely?  Not if you have any knowledge (in the obssessive, guy-with-both-baseballreference.com-and-FanGraphs-open-in-separate-tabs sense) of the history of baseball.  Weirder things have happened before (non-greenie) performance enhancing drugs were a part of baseball.  Much weirder.  It is a weird game where people do things at least this nuts (in one way or another) almost regularly.   

Anyway, I love this deal.  Bautista is hardly getting paid as though anyone expects him to ever repeat his 2010.  They've got him slotted in roughly as a guy who will hit 25-30 HR, draw a bunch of walks, not strikeout all that much, and offer some defensive versatility.  Given the apparent going rates these days, $65 million over five seasons with a team option for a sixth is both fair now, and, if Bautista struggles a couple of years in, still a totally moveable contract, or one that you can simply swallow without too much trouble.  It's really not that much money.  Stoeten, of Drunk Jays Fans fame, is not nuts about the deal, but I really don't see the hangup.  I just like this deal intuitively on its surface, without getting too into the math of it, but Dave Cameron breaks it down pretty convincingly at FanGraphs to satisfy the head as well as the heart.  Jonah Keri was on the Jeff Blair show today, and said he likes it but thinks it comes a year too early, which I think misses the point: if Bautista has another monster year, which is unlikely, or even if he regresses significantly but is still putting up solid power numbers, which is totally likely, there is no way he signs a deal anything like this.  If Bautista is a useful player this season, which I expect he will be, this is not a deal you can sign him to once he gets to free agency.  He is not going to for $8 million and then a bunch of $14s, which is how this one is structured (and, well, the $8 million is buying out his final arbitration year, not a free agent year, but you get what I'm saying here I'm sure). 

And plus Jose Bautista is just awesome to watch.  If you don't like watching Jose Bautista, there is a pretty good chance you don't like watching baseball.  That is my bold and confrontational view on this crucial subject.  If you're as excited about this as I am (note: you almost certainly aren't), here's audio of the press conference, and then Jose Bautista and Alex Anthopolous on Prime Time Sports this evening.  What can I say, I just like that guy.  And in case you were wondering, he's willing to play third this season, even though both Bautista and Anthopolous see him probably returning to the outfield in 2012 if things go the way they expect (this would mean Matt Lawrie as a starter not this year but next, is my guess).  He's not exactly Adrian Beltre out there, but he's way more valuable at third then as a corner voltigeur, so I am completely down with this.   Completely. 

To summarize, this is awesome, and also we got Scott Podsednik for some reason!  When you Google image search his name you mostly get pictures of his Playboy Bunny wife Lisa Dergan who, did you know, holds a degree in Art History as well as the bonered attention of men?  I'm kind of on the fence about posting a racy picture of her though, because I, like all of us here at Baseball Feelings, am a sex-positive feminist and so while raciness itself is awesome, is the sterile, ultimately sexless and woman-effacing pseudoraciness of Playboy or it's lad-mag equivalents really what we want here?  Am I -- are we -- willing to be complicit in that?  Maybe a little, but only a little:

KS