Entering tonight's game against the Baltimore Orioles Bautista is batting .262 with a major league leading 46 homeruns and he's also second in the American League with 110 runs batted in. The 29-yea-old's career year has seemingly come out of nowhere as his previous season high for home runs was 16.
After the Pittsburgh Pirates sent him down to their AAA team in August of 2008 he was traded to the Blue Jays for a player to be named later. In case the enormity of that statement passed you by, let me place the appropriate amount of emphasis on it. The worst team in Major League Baseball, the Pirates, decided that this guy wasn't good enough to be on their major league roster, so they sent him to the minors. Perhaps the the brass of the Toronto Blue Jays saw something that no one else did because when he was acquired I thought he was nothing more than a utility player. With his versatility (he can play third base and the outfield) I figured that he would just spell Scott Rolen, Alex Rios, etc. Well sure enough the 2009 season didn't go according to plan for the Blue Jays and Rolen was dealt at the deadline and Rios was claimed off of waivers by the White Sox. This opened the door for Bautista to play everyday in September and boy did he make the most of it. He hit 10 home runs in the month and built some serious momentum going into this season.
Now part of the reason why Bautista is quickly becoming my favorite player is because he looks exactly like my former housemate Pete.
The similarities don't stop there. Believe it or not Pete was a standout baseball player back in college. In fact, much like Bautista, he had a breakout year that seemingly came out of nowhere. In his sophomore season (2006) Pete hit just .238 and led the team in strikeouts. The kid couldn't lay off those sliders in the dirt. The following year he was an entirely different player. Now I can't find the final boxscore for the Stags 2007 campaign anywhere online, but as of this article written about him (by yours truly) on April 30th of 2007 he was leading the team with a .377 batting average, 16 doubles, and 5 home runs.
Pete's 2007 season earned him all sorts of accolades. He was named First Team All-MAAC, played in an All-Star Game in Fenway Park, and was named to the 2008 Brooks Wallace Watch List.
So naturally I pointed out this striking similarity to Pete back when the Blue Jays first acquired Bautista. At first I'm not sure that Pete had ever heard of Bautista, but he's an avid baseball fan so he eventually saw him play the Yankees, his favorite team, and he saw the resemblance. I have a lot of friends that like sports, but at that point in time no one else that I knew (and who knew Pete) would have known who Jose Bautista was, so I don't think I mentioned this doppelganger situation to anyone else.
So throughout the course of this season whenever I'd be at work watching a Blue Jay game and Bautista would homer I would text Pete and let him know what a great job he was doing, or that his twin brother hit another homerun, etc. Now that Bautista leads the bigs in home runs he's become something of a household name (at least to those of us who play fantasy baseball), so more and more people that know Pete have noticed the resemblance.
Another similarity between Pete and Bautista is that they are both masters of "the pimp job". I'm not sure what, if anything, the term has to do with actual pimps, but what it refers to is the arrogant extended stare after hitting a homerun, or the cocky bat flip afterwards. Jose has obviously hit and pimped a lot more homeruns than Pete, but Pete pimped lazy flyballs like there was no tomorrow.
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