Mets Signing of Jose Bautista Out of Desperation

There was a time, not too long ago that Jose Bautista, A.K.A. Joey Bats, was one of the most feared hitters in all of baseball.

After bouncing around from the Royals, Orioles, Mets (whom he never suited up for, initially) and the Pirates, Bautista finally found a home in Toronto with the Blue Jays where he would become a perennial All Star. In his second season in a Jays uniform, Bautista blasted 54 home runs and drove in 124, taking all of Major League Baseball by storm.

A year later, he duplicated the effort with 43 home runs in 2011.

Soon Bautista was a superstar. Best known for hitting long home runs and flipping his bat in celebration of a postseason homer against the Texas Rangers in 2015, Buatista had built the case for a potential Hall of Fame career. Then the bottom fell out. Bautista's production slipped drastically in 2016 and 2017. Once a 40-home run hitter, Bautista couldn't do better than blast 23 homers in 2017 as his skills quickly diminished.

In 2016, at age 35, he batted only .234 with 22 homers and 69 RBI. Last year, his batting average slipped to .203 with a .308 on base percentage in 157 games for Toronto. Needing to get younger, the Blue Jays let Bautista go after the season.

He hooked on the Atlanta Barves for a short time this year, as Atlanta was hoping he could fill third base until prospect Austin Riley was ready to contribute. But a .143 batting average in 12 games was too much for the Barves to live with any longer, and they cut Bautista. By the way, Riley is still down on the farm for Atlanta.

So why would the Mets, knowing Bautista's recent history want anything to do with him? One word: Desperation.

The Mets lost Juan Lagares for the season with a broken toe, while Yoenis Cespedes is still nursing a quad injury on the disabled list. They felt they needed a veteran bat badly enough that they went out and signed Bautista for the veteran's minimum of about $545,000.

But, the problem is Bautista's signing does not help the Mets now or in the future. At 37-years old, he is just another fading All-Star to go along with a collection of former All-Stars in Jose Reyes, Adrian Gonzalez, Todd Fraizer, etc.

 The Mets have a couple of young guys like Matt DenDekker and Bryce Brentz who have put up decent numbers in Triple-A thus far. Why not call one of them up? What the Bautista signing signals is the Mets do not believe in their farm system, a farm system that has become bereft of talent. Perhaps the Mets saw enough of DenDekker and Brentz in Spring Training to know that neither could be a major contributor for them right now.

As a result the Mets have self-imposed a narrow window of opportunity on themselves. How did this happen so fast? The Mets once had a promising system, but they have failed to restock the shelves after the likes of Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom and Jeryus Familia came up to the  big leagues in the last few years.

If Bautista fails, while it won't hurt financially, the signing will have accomplished absolutely nothing.

Furthermore, should Bautista do enough to stick around, and Cespedes returns from the DL, what are the Mets going to do with a log-jam in the outfield? They already have Jay Bruce, Michael Conforto and Brandon Nimmo out there. Bautista would have to play some infield, which will be an adventure itself.

So at the end of the day, while the teams around the Mets get younger, they get older. This is not good, not good at all.