Lott: Blue Jays’ ‘high-energy’ Dominican contingent continues a long Toronto tradition

Now, as for the rest of you slack (whips dirty needle out…drops on Superchunk)...

On Saturday morning, those four formed a batting-practice group. Bautista led a lively round of Spanish repartee throughout the session. While one sprayed line drives, the other three chatted happily (and noisily) around the batting cage.

“Just like any other Latin American [group] close to the equator, we’re a high-energy, warm, passionate people at anything that we do,” Bautista said earlier, addressing a mix of Toronto and U.S. writers. “We bring that to the table when we play baseball.

“[Toronto writers] have seen have seen me play for a while, and Edwin and maybe a lot of other Dominicans that have come through Toronto. We play with our emotions on our sleeve. That’s usually a good thing. It can be negative in certain situations, but hopefully we don’t take that to the negative side and we can keep it on the positive.”

...When he spoke to Anthopoulos, Bautista was thinking back to last September in Yankee Stadium, when the Jays called a news conference in which Yunel Escobar apologized for writing an anti-gay slur on his eyeblack and wearing it on the field during a game. Understandably, the session was awkward for all involved, compounded by the Spanish-to-English translator provided by the Major League Baseball Players’ Association.

“I watched the whole Escobar thing from afar,” Bautista said, “and I think there were a lot of things that got lost in translation and lost in the cultural differences …

...Energy and passion come naturally to Latin Americans in general, not only baseball players, Bautista said. Their culture, climate and music all play a part.

“Yeah, it’s from a mix,” Bautista said. “Demographics don’t lie. They’ve been studied for a lot of years, and social-cultural qualities and characteristics as well. That’s just how our people and our race [are] as a whole. We have those traits because that’s where we’re from.”