Initially, Bautista's play showed some promise and the potential to meet the expectations that baseball insiders and scouts alike shared when he was on the cusp of Major League Baseball.
Following two seasons with the Jays that typified the standard of a league average player, Bautista broke-out in 2010 to lead baseball in home runs with 54. Were it not for his .267 avg., he would have likely won the American League MVP award as well.
Thus far, Bautista has 16 home runs in 41 games played, 4 more than the nearest competitor and 2 less than the Minnesota Twins have as a club. Initial speculation that Bautista is simply the next in line of hundreds of players to tarnish the game with use of performance enhancing drugs was quickly put to rest through analysis of the numbers.
The following chart courtesy of Beyond The Boxscore and SB NATION analyses his last 3 seasons and the data from this year, to show that he is hitting the ball to left field more than ever, has a better b to strike and walks to strikeout ratio and ground ball to fly ball ratio.
His meteoric rise is due only to better patience at the plate and an understanding of what his skills are, and where his weaknesses exist.
Click on the graph below in the event you wish to actually read the size 2 font.
In the last few years, baseball has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance because of the influx of sabremetrics and the sports nerds that follow them. When Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane changed the face of the game by instituting the Moneyball scheme, he also changed the way statisticians put value on certain stats.
Beane's novel approach identified that there was more to constructing a winning team than great pitching and power hitters. You need speed, strong defense, a blend of ground ball and fly ball pitchers. Such skills could be found for cheap, and with that, scouting staffs began to multiply and many ex-player General Managers were replaced by MIT grads and the like such as Tampa Bay Rays GM Andrew Friedman.
Now, defensive measures and stats like VORP and Wins Over Replacement (WOR) have found a place alongside the like of the RBI and ERA. After all, just how indicative is the RBI statistic of the value of a player. It's easy for Yankees first bagger Mark Teixeira to bat in 100 runs when he's batting behind the likes of Alex Rodriguez, but what about the player that bats well but simply does not have anybody on base ever? See what I'm getting at?
Talk about running off on a tangent. The point was that Jose Bautista is this year's front runner for MVP, and regardless of which statistical measure you fancy, they'll all indicate the same thing.
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