Blue Jays’ Bautista booed, and it might be a good thing

Jose Bautista was regularly booed on Monday in the season’s opening game, no doubt in part due to Orioles’ GM, Dan Duqette’s comments regarding the then-free agent during the offseason.

The Blue Jays squared off against the Baltimore Orioles on Monday, in the first game of the season for both clubs. The Orioles were able to prevail 3-2 in extra innings, on the strength of a Mark Trumbo walk-off, the first ever in Orioles franchise history.

Trumbo’s blast wasn’t the only storyline either, as Marco Estrada performed admirably in his first go-around, Steve Pearce picked up a couple hits in his Blue Jays debut, and obviously the Orioles had a couple things go their way as well.

Underneath the excitement for the season to begin, it appears last season is still pretty fresh for Orioles fans. In case you’ve forgotten, Baltimore was eliminated in the winner-take-all, Wild Card game, against the same opponent they drew for the opener in the Blue Jays. That fact wasn’t lost on them at all on Monday.

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In particular, Jose Bautista was a repeated target of animosity, being repeatedly booed any time he got involved in the play. He struggled in his first game finishing 0-5, but made a pair of encouraging plays on defence, looking better equipped to handle the position than he did in his injury-plagued 2016 effort.

The Orioles fans can be forgiven for not being fond of the Blue Jays, and Bautista in particular certainly makes sense as well. The Dominican has a history of jarring with the division rivals, which has happened on more than one occasion. Bautista has been plunked, thrown at, and has also sent a few balls into the bleachers in key games, all adding fuel to a fire that doesn’t need much encouragement.

One of these evenings was on April 21, 2015, when nearly all of the above happened in one at bat, nearly bringing tensions to a head between the two clubs.

In this case, Bautista got the last laugh, and made no effort to hide his enjoyment of the home run.

In addition to cases like this, the Orioles GM, Dan Duquette, didn’t have anything nice to say about Bautista, who was a free agent at the time. When asked what he thought about the idea of exploring Bautista as an option for the Orioles, he scoffed at the idea and made some short-sighted comments.

All of this boils into a pretty good rivalry, between Bautista and the Orioles, and also the two clubs. While nobody likes to get booed, for some players it’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I would argue that’s the case here.

The 36 year old’s fiery attitude is well documented, and even he would agree that he seems to play better “mad”. That doesn’t mean that he’s walking around screaming at small children and kicking puppies, but it’s pretty easy to tell when he’s locked into that type of zone and headspace.

More often than not, it leads to positive things for the slugger, just as we saw in the video above. Whether the adrenaline gives him additional focus or whatever the case may be, when he’s scowling he usually takes it out on the baseball.

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I’m not suggesting that he should the “Angry Dad” of baseball, but I don’t think he’ll need the encouragement when playing against the Orioles. He hit .333/.438/.630 with 2 home runs and 7 RBI against the Orioles in 2015, and added another 3 long balls last year.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think we’re going to see him go 0-5 against the Orioles very often.