Jose Bautista; the home run trotting, walk taking slugger

Here's a piece originally written for Sports Haze Toronto. It can be found at http://sportshaze.com/toronto/toronto-blue-jays/patience-is-a-virtue-2901

As everybody knows, Jose Bautista swung his way to a historic breakout season last year for the Jays.

Bautista, with a previous career high of 16 in the home run department, mashed 54 home runs in 2010, to go along with 124 RBIs and a steroid-era like .617 slugging percentage.

(Don’t worry Jays fans; this isn’t a post accusing Bautista of anything of the sort.)

I want to use this article to help identify one of Bautista’s other strengths, one that was all too often overlooked last year.

Many Bautista detractors point to his pedestrian .260 batting average when looking at his sensational 2010 season. People like to say that Bautista’s not that great of a hitter, and he was merely the product of a very high 21.7 percent homerun/fly ball ratio.

This means that 21.7 percent of Bautista’s fly balls left the yard last year. While yes, this number is high, and yes, Bautista’s batting average was not sublime, it still doesn`t justify the Bautista haters.

Why not? I’m glad you asked.

Many of the “anti Jose” baseball observers fail to look at one key stat when evaluating Bautista’s talents. It is something that I’ve always noticed about Jose, even during his average-hitting, utility man days. With a little research, my suspicions were proven correct, yet again by the wonderful FanGraphs.  

Bautista walks. A lot.

Not only did Jose smash 54 homeruns in ’10, but he also finished with an OBP of .378. Bautista walked 100 times in ’10, and finished with a solid BB% of 14.6, which was right about in line with his 2009 percentage of 13. 9.

This year has been more of the same for Bautista, as he’s sporting a ridiculous .538 OBP through eight games this season (he`s missed three for the birth of his daughter), with 10 walks.

As first explained in the famous baseball book, Moneyball, OBP is an extremely important, if often overlooked stat. Baseball is all about getting scoring more runs than the other team, and the best way to score runs is to get men on base. It’s as simple as that.  

In recent years, OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) has become an even more vital stat. OPS is used to judge both a player’s ability to get on base and his ability to hit for power. These are two statistics that are imperative to success in baseball, and this is where Bautista really earns his stripes.

Bautista finished with a .995 OPS in 2010, putting him fifth in the MLB, behind such illustrious names as Josh Hamilton, Miguel Cabrera, Joey Votto and Albert Pujols. Bautista finished just a hair behind all four of these players, and the fact that he’s in a group with both the NL and AL MVP in this all important stat is truly telling.  

Bautista’s patience at the plate doesn’t only help with his OBP and OPS numbers, but it helps with other, less quantifiable parts of the game.

Bautista’s usually sees a lot of pitches, which tires pitchers out and helps the rest of the team. Also, because of Bautista’s ability to lay off bad pitches and not chase the off speed stuff, pitchers are forced to throw more fastballs to him; and we all know what Bautista does with fastballs.

Bautista finished with a ludicrously high 36.7 runs above average against the heater last year. To put this in perspective, only two players finished with a higher wFB in 2010. Cabrera and Pujols, who were ranked third and fourth last year in this category, finished pretty far behind Bautista at only 31.6 and 31.5, respectively.

Bautista’s ability to hit good pitches and see a lot of fastballs can all be attributed back to his patience at the plate. While most kids will probably grow up trying to hit homers like Jose, maybe, just maybe, they’ll think about working counts as well.

For more news, thoughts, and the odd bit of knowledge, follow Daniel on twitter @SportsDanMTL.