Peering Into Jose Bautista's Power Surge

Jose Bautista was the first player in the majors to hit 40 home runs this season. Bautista's previous career high in home runs is 16 and in parts of six seasons before this one, he swatted only 59 homers total. Because this is 2010 and everyone in baseball is guilty before proven innocent, the steroid speculation has slowly started to ramp up.

It's not bloggers fueling the speculation, either. The Star's Damien Cox wrote Tuesday that we "Gotta at Least Ask the Question," while the Globe and Mail straight-out asked Bautista about it, putting Cox's unfounded speculation in print. It's happening in the States, too, as ESPN's Bill Simmons inferred on his Twitter feed Monday night that Bautista may be gaining an unnatural advantage. No one's really springing to Bautista's defense, except to say that unproven steroid speculation is unfair. It is jarring to see a career utilityman suddenly surge to the top of baseball's leaderboard in home runs, but perhaps we should take a step back and look for reasons behind his burst of home runs in 2010 that might not be apparent at first glance.

Because this season will be just Bautista's second with 600 plate appearances (assuming he stays healthy), let's start by looking at his minor-league career. Back in 2002, Bautista was a wiry 21-year-old third baseman in the Pirates system playing in the Single-A South Atlantic League. With Hickory that season he hit 14 homers in 129 games. He also had 26 doubles, giving him a nice .470 slugging percentage. Is that a future 40-homer player? Not necessarily, but then home run power is often among the last skill to develop. Either way, it could be fairly said that Bautista had some pretty decent power potential. Ryan Howard hit 19 home runs and slugged just .460 in the Sally League that year and he turned into a pretty nice slugger.

The following season, 2003, wasn't so kind to Bautista, though. He missed time with an injury and only ended up playing 51 games with high Single-A Lynchburg, struggling to a .242/.359/.424 line there. When the season ended, the Pirates were faced with either placing Bautista on their 40-man roster or exposing him to the Rule 5 draft. Because Bautista was entering his age-23 season with no experience at Double-A or above, then-GM Dave Littlefield gambled that no one would put Bautista on a big-league roster. He was wrong. Bautista was drafted by the Orioles in the Rule 5 draft. He struggled there, was put on waivers, and was claimed off waivers by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. From there, the Devil Rays sold him to the Royals and the Royals traded him to the Mets, who immediately flipped him back to the Pirates in a trade involving Kris Benson and Ty Wigginton.

When the 2004 season was finished, Bautista had only accrued 96 plate appearances over 64 games with four different teams. Because Rule 5 players have to be kept on major league rosters or offered back to their original team before being demoted to the minors, he didn't play even one inning in a minor-league game. That means that over two seasons when he should have been in the middle-minors, Bautista played in just 115 games, and more than half of them came as a little-used major league reserve. That's one heck of a career detour that can likely be blamed for setting his development back at least a season or two.

Bautista finally played Double-A ball in 2005 at the age of 24. That's obviously a bit old for Double-A, but his power potential showed up again with 23 homers in 117 games and a .503 slugging percentage with the Eastern League's Altoona Curve. Double-A numbers for a 24-year-old obviously aren't predictive, but since he hadn't played much above the level at all I don't think it's unfair to say that they must have meant something in this case.

That's about it for Bautista's minor-league career. He spent a bit of time at Triple-A at the end of 2005 and a bit more at the beginning of 2006, but the Pirates called him up in May of that year and he appeared in 117 games and got 469 plate appearances for them. By that time, he'd played in 117 games at Double-A, 42 in Triple-A, and had an 11-game call-up at the end of 2005. That was all that stood between him and two years of lost development. He wasn't great with the Pirates in 2006, but he did hit 16 homers in those 469 plate appearances. That's no small feat with half of his games coming at PNC Park, which is notoriously tough on right-handed power hitters thanks to its deeper than normal 383-foot left-center field power alley and massive 410-foot notch in deep left-center. It's true that Bautista hit 11 of his 16 homers at home in 2006, but in the two years after, he hit more homers away from PNC Park than in it.

In 2007, Bautista mostly played every day as the Pirates' third baseman and replicated his 2006 line. By 2008 new management took over the Pirates' front office and Bautista's playing time dwindled, though his production only dipped a small amount in his diminished playing time. In June, the Pirates drafted third baseman Pedro Alvarez. In July, they traded for third baseman Andy LaRoche. No one was surprised when Bautista was shipped off to the Blue Jays in late August for backup catcher Robinzon Diaz.

Now, after a 2009 that resembled his 2006-08 seasons pretty strongly, Bautista has broken out in a huge way. Of his 40 homers, 25 have come in the Rogers Centre. The Blue Jays' home park is much more traditionally shaped than PNC with a normal 372-foot power alley to left-center and no notch between the alley and the 400-foot center field fence.

So added together, Bautista lost two years of development to an injury and the Rule 5 draft, then was hurried to the majors because he was too old for the minors. When he finally did make it to the majors, he was mostly used as a utility player except for 2007, and he spent a big chunk of time in a park that's not friendly to right-handed power. Now he's playing every day in a much friendlier park and he's still just 29, not terribly old especially given his two lost seasons.

I'm not saying that anyone should have seen this explosion coming from Bautista. A few months ago, there was every reason in the world to think that he was a utilityman with an average bat and little more. But now that the power surge has come, it's not all that hard to pick back through his history and see that maybe there were more signs that this was coming than people think.

He was once a prospect with some power potential, but for a number of reasons that are much easier to see in hindsight, that potential hasn't bloomed until this year. Now he's got 40 home runs before Labor Day. It's certainly improbable, but it's not entirely implausible.