Blue Jays should resist urge to re-sign Bautista

An important thing for both Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion to remember is that last winter, Alex Gordon didn’t sign until January 6, Chris Davis didn’t sign until January 21, and Yoenis Cespedes didn’t sign until January 26.

An important thing for the Blue Jays to remember is that you make deals with your head, not with your heart.

Encarnacion would have made all the sense in the world for the Blue Jays to bring back before they added Kendrys Morales and Steve Pearce, but those deals are done, and there’s no undoing them just because the league-wide demand for the 42-homer man hasn’t materialized as anticipated. As Toronto general manager Ross Atkins told reporters on Wednesday, “It’s hard for us to see. … We want to get the most out of every player on our roster. If you add Edwin to those three pieces (Morales, Pearce, and Justin Smoak), it’s hard to do that.”

The right deal will come along for Encarnacion before the winter is over, and some team will be better for having his bat in the lineup. As for Bautista, it’s a much dicier market, and much easier path for a return to Toronto when the current depth chart has an Ezequiel Carrera/Melvin Upton Jr. platoon in right field. There’s also much greater reason for the Blue Jays to resist every urge they might have to make it happen.

Bautista turned 36 in October, a month that saw him start the playoffs like the player Toronto has known and loved, with a homer in the wild card game and another in the division series opener in Texas. In the remaining seven games of the postseason, Bautista was 3-for-26 with 10 strikeouts, and inadvertently nicknamed Cleveland’s bullpen, “The Circumstances,” with his conspiratorial talk about the strike zone in the ALCS.

It’s tough, because when you think about Bautista, you think about the guy who hit 54 homers in 2010, then led the majors again with 43 the next year. He’s been in the top 10 in MVP voting four times this decade, and, heck, the most famous bat flip in Canadian history was a mere 14 months ago – after a season in which Bautista hit 40 dingers and led the American League with 110 walks.

You cannot, however, just write off 2016 as a simple off year, as Bautista battled through injuries to hit .234/.366/.452 with only 22 home runs. You cannot pretend that his play in right field hasn’t slipped to the point where the words “defensive liability” will soon be applied, if they aren’t already. You cannot forget that the Blue Jays need to become less righty-dominant in their lineup, nor can you ignore the draft pick compensation to be received for Bautista signing elsewhere.

There are entirely too many reasons for Toronto not to bring back Bautista, with the main arguments for doing it being a mix of sentiment and faith in his ability to bounce back. Again, he’s 36, and if the Blue Jays are really being honest with themselves about it, Bautista has the same problem fitting into the 2017 roster as Encarnacion: the presence of Morales, Pearce, and Smoak.

The best available options on the free agent market all are familiar faces in Toronto: Michael Saunders, Ben Revere, and Colby Rasmus. Well, okay, not Rasmus so much after his previous spell with the Blue Jays, but Saunders is coming off an All-Star season in his home country, while Revere was great during the 2015 stretch run and is a strong value play after an injury-plagued year with Washington where he never really got on track.

There also are plenty of established, lefty-hitting right fielders who would figure to be available via trade, including Jay Bruce or Curtis Granderson from the Mets, Seth Smith from the Mariners, and Nick Markakis from the Braves. Or, if you wanted to stick with that familiarity theme, there’s one year to go on Melky Cabrera’s deal with the suddenly rebuilding White Sox.

None of these options is as electrifying as Bautista. What the Blue Jays have to know is, neither is Bautista.