Jose Bautista shakes usual pattern with rare opposite-field home run
TORONTO — Everyone knows how you’re supposed to pitch Jose Bautista. Just stay away. Living on the outer edge and beyond is the tried-and-true method for keeping the veteran slugger down.
Bautista loves balls middle-in. Toronto Blue Jays fans have seen him turn on those pitches countless times and lay them to rest in the left-field bleachers. As a result, pitchers — ever reticent to comply with his wishes — make a point of avoiding his wheelhouse. Instead, they pitch him here:
As a result, Bautista normally has to wait for mistakes or work favourable counts to get his. During Wednesday night’s 4-0 win over the Baltimore Orioles, that’s not how it went down.
To be fair to Orioles starter Wade Miley, he did stick to the script. In his first confrontation with Bautista he steered well clear of his power, putting the only two pitches of the at-bat on the outside corner of the plate.
Unfortunately for the southpaw, the second offering — a 76.5 mph curveball — stayed up and the Blue Jays slugger muscled a home run out to right field.
The wall-scraper will hardly go down as one of Bautista’s prettiest round-trippers, but it was remarkable for him. The leadoff shot was just the the 10th opposite-field home run of his career — compared to 312 to centre or left.
“Yeah you don’t see many to right field,” Gibbons said of the shot in something of an understatement. “They tend to be from centre field on over.”
For the record, Bautista’s career spray chart looks like this (home runs in red):
The last time he added any red on the right side of the spray chart came on Sept. 12, 2015. That effort barely counts as the ball landed in the second row of the infamous right-field porch at Yankee Stadium.
So, what exactly are we meant to make of this unusual home run? In larger terms, probably nothing. It would be surprising to see Jose Bautista turn into an all-fields hitter at the age of 36 after a successful career as one of the best pull hitters in the game.
This particular play does show that the Blue Jays right fielder may be stronger than we give him credit for, though. When your swing is geared for turning on balls driving pitches the other way certainly takes some strength, whereas Bautista’s power tends to be attributed primarily to his bat speed.
“He’s still so strong,” Gibbons said of the slugger. “So when he catches it right [it goes].”
Bautista now has 11 opposite-field hits in 2017 — just one shy of his total from last year — and he’s hitting a solid .275 on balls that way. However, the sample size is far too small to pull something concrete out of those numbers.
Realistically, this was far more of an oddity than something signifying any kind of trend. Oddities are fun though, and it’s always exciting to go to the ballpark and see a player surprise you — especially one whose pattern is as well-established as Jose Bautista’s.
