It may have been worth a try, though I’m not sure I’d have tried it. That’s a classic second-guess, I concede. Still, asking a 37-year-old who’d been mostly an outfielder to move to third base was akin to wishing on a star.
Had it worked, we’d be celebrating Alex Anthopoulos as an outside-the-box visionary. That it didn’t is yet another reminder as to why such a box exists. Not every wild notion is a rational notion.
Jose Bautista hit two home runs in 40 plate appearances for the Atlanta Braves. That was the good news. The bad was that he managed only three other hits. He was a liability from the start.
Had he been on a last-place team, his presence in the lineup might have been overlooked. The Braves are in first place. For the first time since 2013, they’re playing for something. There’s no space for a non-producer on a 25-man roster, of which nearly half consists of pitchers.
The Braves released Bautista Sunday morning. This came 32 days after they'd signed him to a minor-league deal. They sent him to the minors, where he was 11-for-43 (.256) without a home run. They jammed him into their big-league lineup on May 4. He had a hit in each of his first three games, each of which the Braves lost. He would go 2-for-25 thereafter. He leaves having compiled a Baseball-Reference WAR of minus-0.3
This shouldn’t have been surprising. Going by bWAR, Bautista was second-worst player in the majors last season. Even Matt Kemp, whom Anthopoulos offloaded in a salary dump, was slightly better. (And Kemp, miracle of miracles, has had a decent year for the Dodgers, not that there’d have been a spot for him in this outfield.)
That Bautista hit 23 homers last year and still couldn’t find employment, not even as a DH, told us all we needed to know. But Anthopoulos had worked with Joey Bats in Toronto, and he figured, “Why the heck not?”
The answer: because Joey Bats has nothing left. He didn’t cost the Braves much money, but this sort of experiment should be filed under, “Don’t try again.” Ryan Flaherty, the definition of a replacement-level player, is now better than Bautista. Johan Camargo, who isn’t hitting for average, is better than the 37-year-old. And then there’s Austin Riley, who has nine homers in 39 minor-league games.
Credit Anthopoulos for not drawing this out any longer, though it was clear 10 days ago that this wasn’t working and wouldn’t work. Apologies for quoting myself, but here’s this from 32 days ago: “There’s a part of me that finds this intriguing. There’s also a part that figures it won’t amount to much.”
Cue the Ron Howard narration: It didn’t.
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