Last season, Jose Bautista emerged from obscurity to hit 54 home runs for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was the highest total anyone had reached in four seasons. He slugged 12 more homers than NL leader Albert Pujols and 15 more than AL runner-up Paul Konerko.
But there was no way he'd do it again, right? The most homers Bautista had previously hit in a single season was 16 in 2006. Bautista would be the 2011 version of Brady Anderson, who dropped from 50 homers in 1996 to only 18 the next year. The law of averages dictated that he'd regress to a total of 20-25 home runs this season.
So far, it looks like Bautista apparently has no use for such math. He has seven home runs this season, tied for the major league lead. Even better for the Jays, �his overall production has been much more consistent.
This past weekend against the Tampa Bay Rays, Bautista went 6 for 8 with three homers three RBIs and five walks. Go ahead and look at that batting line again. Bautista only made two outs in three games.
As Dave Cameron points out at Fangraphs, Bautista isn't hitting as well as he did last season. He's hitting even better.
Bautista's ridiculous start to the season ? he's now hitting .359/.506/.750, good for a Major League best .533 wOBA after making just two outs over the course of the three games against the Rays this weekend ? has effectively ended any legitimate speculation about whether Bautista's season was an enormous outlier. He is still doing all of the things that made him so good last year, only now he's proving that he can do it while hardly seeing any pitches in the strike zone, and his patience has upped his walk rate to elite levels as well.
That leads Cameron to ask a question that would've seemed inconceivable coming into this season: Is Jose Bautista the best hitter in the American League? Better than Miguel Cabrera? Better than Josh Hamilton? Better than Alex Rodriguez or Robinson Cano?
If that's the case, the five-year, $64 million contract extension Bautista signed in February will be a fantastic deal for the Blue Jays. At the time, the contract raised fears that Toronto had hung another albatross around its organizational neck, a la Vernon Wells. But even if Bautista plays well enough to vest a sixth-year option for $13 million, his annual salary wouldn't even put him among baseball's 25 highest-paid players this year.
Even Evan Longoria would have to�admit that's a bargain.
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