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“Only so much that I can control, my man,” Jose Bautista said. He did not sound bitter; he was just a man resigned to the world, and how it works.

He had gone one for three with a single and an intentional walk in a nice little 3-0 win over the New York Yankees; he wasn’t the reason the Toronto Blue Jays won, and would not have been the reason they lost. Not a bad day. Not a great one. It was OK.

And afterwards, in a nearly empty clubhouse, Bautista pulled on the gold-and-red hightops he had chosen that morning. Since the conversation in the American League has been reduced to a nostalgia-fuelling collapse by the Boston Red Sox and the race for the Most Valuable Player, that was what he talked about.

Bautista leads the AL in home runs (42), on-base percentage (.448), slugging percentage (.623), and — you could probably see this coming — on-base plus slugging percentage, or OPS (1.071). His advanced metrics are similarly powerful. On the balance, he has been the best hitter in baseball. He probably won’t win, though. And if he doesn’t, it will be because he plays for the Toronto Blue Jays.

“If you paint that scenario, the only thing I can do is be disappointed,” Bautista said. “I mean, it’s out of my control anyway, so there’s not much of another type of reaction that I can have. Last year it was batting average; this year they’re talking about the team not making it to the playoffs. I don’t know.”

The dismissal of Bautista’s candidacy rests largely on Toronto’s record. The Jays are locked into fourth place in the AL East, as per tradition, at 77-75. The other candidates, though, all play for winners. Detroit pitcher Justin Verlander is 24-5 after allowing three hits over eight innings in a 3-0 win over Oakland on Sunday, and momentum seems to favour his candidacy for the division-leading Tigers. Verlander’s teammate Miguel Cabrera is the league’s second-most productive hitter after Bautista. In Boston, you have leadoff hitter Jacoby Ellsbury, first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, even second baseman Dustin Pedroia, though Boston’s ongoing spiral could hurt their respective candidacies.

This year’s obligatory Yankee, meanwhile, is centre-fielder Curtis Granderson, who entered Sunday’s games second in home runs with 40, was tied for the league lead in RBIs with 111, and first in runs scored by a wide margin with 131. Those numbers didn’t change, though, because the Yankees chose to rest him. The first-place Yankees will be in the playoffs; the Jays will not. Sunday, there was nothing much at stake except the game.

Now, that’s not Jose Bautista’s fault. It’s not his fault the team’s second-best hitter has been, by OPS, Edwin Encarnacion. It’s not his fault Toronto has some of the worst pitching in baseball, Brandon Morrow’s gem Sunday notwithstanding. It’s not his fault the bullpen has been flammable. But it will all be held against him, which turns this season into an exercise in Zen.

“You can assume if I had hitters that would have been hotter at times, or more than one strong hitter behind me, that I would be pitched to in some situations that I don’t,” Bautista says matter-of-factly. “The one thing I can look at is I’ve come up to the plate probably 170 times with runners in scoring position, but I got walked maybe 60 times. It’s out of my control. I don’t get pitched to. I look at other people that might have 50 or 60 more at-bats. If I had 50 more at-bats with runners in scoring position, would I have more RBIs? I can assume that I would.

“It’s been my biggest challenge this year, swinging at strikes, laying off balls, realizing when people are trying to pitch around me, and most of the time it is when there are runners on base.”

Bautista does his homework, clearly. In 162 plate appearances with runners in scoring position he has been walked 57 times; he gets on base over half the time with runners at second or third, numbers only Cabrera can match. He has been intentionally walked 23 times this season; he was intentionally walked twice all of last year when he launched 54 homers. The other big-time hitters have far more at-bats with runners in scoring position. How much more is he being pitched around?

“A lot more,” Bautista says. “[And after the all-star break] I lost my patience at times, and I found myself swinging at a lot of pitches out of the zone, because I want to — after some time, coming up to the plate and you see ball, ball, ball, ball, and maybe not even balls, but strikes in the part of the strike zone where it’s not my preference — I was going after a lot of pitches that usually I don’t go after, because that might be the only at-bat that I get.”

SharoneWright wrote:George Bell managed.