Rumors & Rumblings: Bryant is scouts’ pick for NL MVP

Somebody is going to be very disappointed this off-season.

Right fielder Jose Bautista reportedly was seeking a five-year, $125 million contract extension from the Toronto Blue Jays during spring training.

The talks went nowhere and Bautista will become a free agent in November coming off an injury-ravaged season. He is hitting .227 with 17 home runs with a .793 OPS in 91 games following a six-year run where he hit a combined 227 homers and was selected to the All-Star Game each year.

It will be interesting to see how Bautista’s market plays out this winter. A source with knowledge of the situation says Bautista has not softened his stance on giving the Blue Jays a potential hometown discount and wants to see what offers are out there.

Executives and scouts aren’t sure what kind of deal Bautista will get.

“I know it’s not going to be five and 125,” an executive from an NL team said. “Beyond that, I really don’t know. That’s a tough one. I don’t see him going back to Toronto. I think that ship has sailed, especially since he is having leg issues now and Toronto plays on artificial turf. I say he winds up in the American League where DHing is an option.”

The Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista won’t stop speaking his mind

As long as they still have the First Amendment up in Toronto, Jose Bautista will speak freely.

The epic bat flip was the perfect accelerant in the virtual world: shareable, brief, visual, dramatic, meme-provoking. It was an apt display for these times, if not the century of baseball that preceded it. Hall of Fame relief pitcher Goose Gossage, for instance, called Bautista “a disgrace to the game.”

“That’s always going to be there. They’re purists,” Bautista says of his critics. “And I get it. It’s hard to see the change in your sport, and hard to accept and swallow sometimes. Do you think Larry Bird cringes when he watches a game now and sees alley-oops left and right and people draining threes without setting plays and the way they play defense, especially in the regular season? Probably. He’s like, Man, back in my day it was different.

“But I don’t know why other sports are more accepting of that change. Baseball is the only sport where people try to hold on to the past and prevent that change from happening.

“I think most people understood that it was spur of the moment, a natural reaction in a celebratory way to a big, huge moment in a playoff game. I think most of the negative backlash came from the losing part: the Texas region.”

Blue Jays, Rangers throw punches during game | MLB.com

I usually don’t care about this kind of stuff. This fracas was pretty stupid though.