Joey Bats Can't Stop, Won't Stop

This story originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

Jose Bautista's story wasn't supposed to have this many chapters to it, and yet it still remains far from complete.

There was once a time when Bautista was thought of as a potential one-hit wonder, but his improbable rise to stardom during his age-29 season turned out to only be the beginning. With each passing year, each towering home run, each All-Star Game selection, each epic staredown, Bautista has firmly entrenched himself among the Toronto Blue Jays' all-time greats.

In his first postseason series, with his team facing elimination, Bautista delivered the most legendary home run Canada has seen in 22 years and completed it with the most talked about bat flip ever. It was an all-time great Blue Jays moment that set the internet ablaze. In a dramatic do-or-die contest that will go down as one of the most unbelievable and thrilling games ever played in Toronto, Bautista had his moment—the one he'd been waiting his entire career for.

Thirty years from now, baseball fans will without hesitation be able to recall where they were for that seventh inning at-bat. That's how you know it was special.

When you think of the biggest home runs in Blue Jays history, Joe Carter's walk-off bomb against Mitch Williams in 1993 to help Toronto secure its second consecutive World Series title takes the cake. Roberto Alomar's shot off Dennis Eckersley in Game 4 of the 1992 ALCS is right up there with it. So, too, is Ed Sprague's Game 2 pinch-hit blast in the ninth inning of the 1992 World Series. Bautista has secured himself a seat at that table for releasing decades of pent-up frustration on that baseball Wednesday night. Add that badass stare and bat flip, after an incredibly bizarre top half of the inning, and it's Toronto's all-time GTFO moment.

It's a given now that Bautista will go down as one of the greatest athletes to ever play in Toronto, but how he got to this point definitely required some luck on the Blue Jays' end.

After the former 20th-round pick was passed around from club to club, playing on four teams alone in 2004, Toronto hit the jackpot by trading for Bautista in a non-headline grabbing deal with the Pirates in August 2008.

Roy Halladay and A.J. Burnett were anchoring the staff at the time, while Alex Rios and Vernon Wells occupied the middle-of-the-order spots in Toronto's lineup. J.P. Ricciardi was general manager, John Gibbons was fired mid-season in what was his first stint as Blue Jays manager and replaced by Cito Gaston, who came back for his second managerial job with the club. Seven years later, Bautista, the longest-serving member of the team, is the only holdover that remains from that roster.

It took a calendar year for Toronto to start getting a taste of what it received in return for Robinson Diaz, who lasted 44 games in the big leagues. A power surge at the end of the 2009 season, and then a scorching-hot spring training, earned Bautista a look the following year. He responded by hitting a major league-leading 54 home runs during the 2010 campaign, setting a Blue Jays franchise record.

Bautista's breakout forced the organization to answer a difficult question as he entered his final year of arbitration: With one elite season to his name, was he worth big money and a long-term investment?

Toronto general manager Alex Anthopoulos believed so, handing Bautista a five-year, $65 million contract, showing his trust in the slugger and the adjustments the Dominican native made with then-hitting coach Dwayne Murphy. Anthopoulos has acquired a glutton of All-Stars since, including a handful this season, but he probably hasn't made a better move. That contract turned out to be laughably low for the value Bautista provided to this team.

He still remains one of the sport's greatest power threats five years after his surprise breakout. Since blasting 54—the most in a single season since Ryan Howard clubbed 58 in 2006—he's hit 43, 27, 28, 35 and pounded another 40 this season. No player has hit more homers than him since 2010.

Newcomers and fellow All-Stars Josh Donaldson and Russell Martin stole some of the spotlight away from him at the beginning of the season. Then came David Price and Troy Tulowitzki. The Blue Jays were a well-balanced team full of star players, different from previous seasons when it was Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, and then everyone else.

But as great as the new additions have been, the Blue Jays wouldn't be in the position they are today without Joey Bats.

Bautista had a team-high .377 on-base percentage, a .900-plus OPS for the fourth time in six seasons, drew a league-high 110 walks and placed fourth in the majors with 114 RBI. He's kept his superstar title a lot longer than most would have predicted and made Anthopoulos look like a genius for buying into his talents when the track record probably suggested a half-decade contract was excessive.

Yet, here he is—not quite 2010-11 level Bautista, but one of the game's best, nonetheless. A strong argument can be made that Bautista's on the Blue Jays' Mount Rushmore—something that wouldn't have seemed possible even after his 54-homer, 124-RBI, .600-plus slugging 2010 campaign. The fact that monstrous season wasn't the best of his career says everything you need to know about how his following years with the club have played out.

Bautista's made more All-Star teams than any position player to don a Blue Jays uniform, and is one shy of tying Dave Stieb for the most in franchise history. He trails only Carlos Delgado on the franchise's all-time home run leaderboard. He'll soon be the No. 1 leader in WAR, by both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference, among position players, and is top five in OBP and slugging, as well as advanced offensive metrics like isolated power, weighted on base average and weighted runs created. His 15.5 percent walk rate as a Blue Jay ranks first, and his 8.1 WAR campaign in 2011 was the highest in a single season until Donaldson eclipsed that mark with an MVP-type year.

Bautista will be remembered in this city long after his playing days are over—No. 19 will one day find his name plastered across the facing of the 500 level alongside exceptional company.

After gutting out close to 1,000 regular season games with the Blue Jays, he's finally on the big stage and doing big things. With as many as two series left in Toronto's emotionally-gripping 2015 season, there's plenty of time for Bautista to add to his legend.