We all know that Jose Bautista is destroying worlds this season: the Bautista (hat tip: Bradley Woodrum) has mashed 20 homeruns and posted a .513 wOBA, accumulated 5 WAR in only 61 games. To put that in some perspective, his .513 wOBA would rank 22nd all-time if the season ended today, and when you adjust for the scoring environment, it’d rank as the fourth best offensive season in major league history (trailing only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds). He’s having a season for the record books.

In thinking about this recently, I started pondering: how does Bautista’s homerun pace compare with other all-time great seasons? We’re all captivated by a homerun race, and while Bautista isn’t going to break any single-season homerun records, has his homerun pace been as impressive as the rest of his season? And so, I decided to compare his 2011 season against batters that hit 70+ homeruns (Bonds, 2001), 65 homeruns (McGwire, 1999), 60 homeruns (Ruth, 1927), and 54 homeruns (Bautista, 2010). Take a peek:

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Kyle Drabek got his first all-important pitcher win since May 16 last night as the Blue Jays beat the Royals 8-5. Coming off of a disaster start against Cleveland last week, it came as a bit of a relief. However, Drabek (23) was hardly impressive. With three walks and no strikeouts, Drabek arguably pitched worse than Kansas City’s starter, the legendary Vin Mazzaro (three strikeouts, one walk, one home run, and laughable defensive plays by Melky Cabrera, Matt Treanor (Treanor!) and Jeff Francoeur). It’s been a rough season all around for a pitcher some were touting as a potential front-of-the-rotation starter. What should the Jays do about it?

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The following data is current through 5-30-2011.

If you, dear reader, are like me, then you agonize unnecessarily over every lineup on every team in every game. Aaron Rowand leading off?! Yargh! No! Carlos Gomez batting second for the Brewers?! WRONG. Aaron Miles batting anything?! Unforgivable.

Holding egos constant, inefficiency is the greatest enemy of success. With regards to lineups, however, teams can really only lose a handful of runs over the course of full season, but a handful of runs, in real terms, can mean the difference between the division or a boring October. So it’s a dicey proposition. A mismanaged lineup on the Royals team does not mean a whole lot because they will lose the division by several trillion runs. A few lost runs for the Rays, Yankees, or Red Sox, though, can mean the season.
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Jo-Jo Reyes will not go down in history as the starting pitcher with the longest winless streak. As it stands, his 28 starts in between victories is tied for the longest stretch in MLB History. After last tasting victory on June 13, 2008, Reyes was a winner last night.

In addition to getting his first win since 2008, Reyes tossed a complete game for the first time in his big league career. The lefty scattered eight hits over nine innings against the Cleveland Indians, allowing a run on a solo-blast by Shelley Duncan. He struck out four batters while walking an equal amount, but induced 13 groundballs – including three double-play balls. While Reyes earned the victory against the Indians, it was not his best game of the season.

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Continuing our Trade Targets series, here are five middle infielders who could be available at (or before) the deadline.

PLAYER: Jose Reyes
TEAM: Mets
POSSIBLE DESTINATION(S): Giants, Reds, Brewers
CONTRACT STATUS: $11 million, free agent after the season
PROJECTED WAR: 3.3

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When talking about a player’s defensive value, you will almost never hear things like errors or fielding percentage discussed on FanGraphs. These metrics have all kinds of problems, and we simply have better ways to evaluate the abilities of defenders nowadays. Occasionally, errors and fielding percentage do tell the story correctly, however. For instance, I present Edwin Encarnacion.

The Blue Jays began the season with E5 as their starting third baseman. He’s played 141 innings in 16 games at the position this year during which time he has already made eight errors, tying him for the league lead among third baseman. The man he is tied with, Mark Reynolds, has played 430 innings at third base this year. Encarnacion has made the same amount of errors as the league leader in 1/3 of the playing time.

Or, if you want to look at it from a fielding percentage standpoint, his mark at third base this year is .784. The next lowest mark of any semi-regular player in baseball is Andy LaRoche at .892. How low is E5’s fielding percentage? Let’s just put it this way – Jose Bautista slugging percentage is higher than Encarnacion’s fielding percentage at third base. Disenchanted with his play at third, the Jays have recently used Encarnacion more at first base; he has the lowest fielding percentage in baseball of any first baseman too.

In 200 innings in the field, he has made 11 errors. A normal everyday position player will rack up about 1,300 defensive innings over the course of the season – at this rate, over a full season, Encarnacion would finish the year with about 70 errors. Seventy.

Teams have been putting up with E5’s defensive issues over the years in order to get his bat into the line-up, but this year, he’s not even providing any offensive value – he’s hitting just .237/.262/.324, he’s without a home run, and he’s decided to just stop walking. His ZIPS projection over the rest of the season is .247/.313/.427, good for a .328 wOBA that would make him roughly a league average hitter.

A league average hitter who is also one of the worst defensive players in baseball is not a Major Leaguer. The Blue Jays have resisted bringing up top prospect Brett Lawrie from Triple-A Las Vegas, in part because his defense at third base is also not very good, but there’s no way the Blue Jays should continue to pencil Encarnacion’s name into the line-up. He’s an absolute disaster in the field, and his bat simply doesn’t even come close to making up for it.

Despite their current three game losing streak, Toronto should have some hopes for contending for the wild-card this year. They’re only four games behind the Red Sox and Yankees, have scored more runs than they’ve allowed, and have the game’s best hitter anchoring a solid line-up. If they patch a few holes and keep their pitchers relatively healthy, the Jays could stay in the race all summer.

If they’re not convinced that Lawrie is ready yet – and remember, Las Vegas is a hitter’s paradise, so you have to deflate his Triple-A numbers by a good amount – they should still be able to find a competent alternative at third base. There’s no reason that the Jays should continue to put up with a never-ending series of errors from one of the worst defenders the sport has seen in a long time.

I think I’m like most baseball fans in that when I think of a designated hitter, I think of home runs. The DH spot has usually been filled by power hitters since its inception in 1973, and that makes sense. If a player is playing a position with no defensive value, he needs to produce on offense. Home runs are the most valuable offensive event. The most valuable hitters in any given year usually have plenty of home runs and extra base hits. One often hears that a player who doesn’t hit for power doesn’t have the bat to play on the “easy end” of the defensive spectrum, and and even moreso in the case of a player who is primarily a DH. Billy Butler is a current example of a player who mostly fills the DH spot, but since he hasn’t hit for much power (yet), you will sometimes hear people say that he doesn’t fit the profile of a DH. Without focusing specifically on Butler, I’d like to write briefly about what it means to “hit well enough to be DH,” and then to see how often that actually happens with a relatively low amount of power.

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In the wake of his demolition of the Twins the previous weekend, last week was apparently the Nerdosphere’s official Jose Bautista Fest. As we bask in the the heat generated by the re-entry of Bautista’s various shots into the left-field seats, it is worth noticing some striking similarities between the mashing Blue Jay’s recent path and that begun just a season earlier by Tampa Bay’s Ben Zobrist. While Bautista is easily the superior hitter, Zobrist is no slouch himself. Beyond the general career parallels, what might make this worth examining is what we might learn about the sort of hitters that can develop power seemingly “out of nowhere” as these two did.

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Since the Chuck Norris meme became mainstream a few years ago, it has inevitably sprung offshoots in different genres, and baseball is no exception. Matt Wieters Facts took off, and more recently, we’ve seen Eric Hosmer Facts.

Well, I’m here to present you with Jose Bautista Facts, but there’s one slight difference – despite being just as crazy, these facts are all true (h/t to DrewGROF on Twitter for noticing this first).

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When the Blue Jays signed Jose Bautista to a five-year, $65 million contract extension before spring training, I said the following:

I get why Toronto made this deal. I think there’s a pretty decent chance he lives up to the contract, even if he’ll likely be perceived as a bust for not repeating his 2010 line each year going forward. However, for me, I’m not sure Toronto got enough of a discount on his expected free agent price to absorb the extra risk of doing this deal now. If my option was take this deal now or let him play out 2011 and re-evaluate at the end of the year, I think I would have waited.

It’s a good thing for Blue Jays fans that I’m not in charge because I would have cost them a lot of money. What’s worse is that I probably would have cost them the chance to keep Bautista in Toronto past this year, because given the start he’s off to this year there’s little chance that the Blue Jays would have been able to re-sign him after this season. The question I want to ask today, though, is just how much did Alex Anthopolous save the Blue Jays with his preemptive strike, signing Bautista before his price went through the roof?

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