TORONTO — Jose Bautista will sign a one-day contract so he can retire as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays ahead of his addition to the club’s Level of Excellence on Saturday, the club announced Friday.
The ceremonial move brings home one of the most iconic and important players in franchise history, who split his final big-league season in 2018 between Atlanta, the Mets and Philadelphia after parting with the Blue Jays following the 2017 campaign.
He also represented the Dominican Republic at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Bautista’s re-signing ahead of his official retirement isn’t a first for the Blue Jays — at the end of the 2013 season, Roy Halladay approached team officials and asked if they’d be open to the idea, which they obviously were.
Bautista will become the first player added to the Level of Excellence since Halladay in 2018 and it was his ascension to superstar status that helped the club reset from the Hall of Fame right-hander’s departure following the 2009 season.
In 2010, Bautista set a franchise record with 54 home runs and his emergence, along with that of Edwin Encarnacion, prompted the Blue Jays to speed up the timeline on a rebuild, eventually leading to the post-season runs of 2015 and ’16.
It was during that ’15 run that Bautista produced his signature moment, the bat-flip homer during the madcap seventh inning in Game 5 of the ALDS versus the Texas Rangers.
His legacy, of course, runs far deeper than that.
He’s the franchise’s all-time leader among position players in Wins Above Replacement, as calculated by Baseball Reference, at 38.3, his 288 homers are second only to Carlos Delgado’s 366, his 803 walks second to Delgado’s 827, his 790 runs second to Delgado’s 889, his 766 RBIs third, behind Delgado’s 1,058 and Vernon Wells’ 813. All while helping rekindle interest in and passion for a franchise that had been stuck in the mud after consecutive World Series titles in 1992 and ’93.
During an interview for my 2021 book, The Big 50: Toronto Blue Jays, Bautista said, “I wish I could have retired playing my last game as a Blue Jay. But you can’t get everything that you want in life. That’s one of those things for me.”
By signing a one-day contract, he won’t play his last game in the majors as a Blue Jay, but at least he’ll retire as one.
