Why Jose Bautista Inc.’s IPO fell flat

Sources have told Jeff Blair Show that Blue Jays ownership gave management additional cash to get the Jose Bautista deal done, while still leaving enough budget to address existing holes.

Just for the record, as news began leaking late Monday and throughout Tuesday that the Toronto Blue Jays were on the verge of a rapprochement with their prodigal slugger, Jose Bautista, the share price for Rogers Communications slipped.

I mean, it didn’t crash or anything. But when all the sages started tweeting about their sources, to the extent that the financial markets paid attention to the idea of the Blue Jays re-uniting with a 36-year-old slugger whose bat speed may or may not be fading faster than the setting sun, their assessment was a collective “meh.”

Shares of the Blue Jays parent company (of which Sportsnet is a subsidiary and I am an employee) dipped from $51.21 on Monday to $50.90 at the close on Tuesday, at which time the prospect of Bautista returning on an incentive-laden, option-heavy one-year deal that guarantees him $18-million had been accounted for by whatever algorithms dictate these things.

Right, right. Small sample size. Well, over the course of the off-season as it became increasingly clear that the Blue Jays would be perfectly happy going forward without Bautista, preferring to get the first-round, compensatory draft pick that whichever team that signed him would have had to cough up, the financial markets seemed enthused.

Rogers shares experienced a roughly $1-billion increase in market capitalization since the winter meetings in early December—a period in which it became clear that not only Bautista but fellow bash brother free agent Edwin Encarnacion would be taking their talents elsewhere in free agency.

Now, there may be those who would argue that the share price of a company with a market cap of roughly $20 billion and approximately 26,000 employees likely wouldn’t fluctuate with the fortunes of a single, aging right fielder who has become a defensive liability, but don’t include Jose Bautista in that crowd.

Normally when an athlete returns — and we say “returns” because until the last 72 hours or so it seemed inevitable that Bautista’s nine-year run in the city where he found fame and fortune after five years as a fringe MLBer had come to an end — the emotions aren’t that complicated.

If the guy can still play — he put up an .817 OPS in an injury-hampered age-35 season (.817 OPS) — and the contract isn’t crippling, it’s easy to welcome him back.

But Bautista’s case is different. He doesn’t inspire the warm and fuzzies, thanks mainly to his studied rejection of even pretending to be warm and fuzzy. Bautista has the hard heart of a day trader. In his world teddy bears have teeth.

It was Bautista, remember, who pulled what is probably the single greatest “me-first” moment in the history of Toronto team sports when he rolled into the first day of spring training a year ago — a day that normally would have been given over to reminisce about his bat-flip homer against the Texas Rangers just a few months before — and tried to make a financial argument as the straw that stirs the share price.

“It’s no secret that in a publicly-traded company everybody can track performance fairly easily,” he said in a self-directed press conference. “Stock prices are closely monitored by the whole financial world. I think there is a direct correlation with the success of (Rogers) earnings per share after we started experiencing success. Are they going to put it out in the media and say ‘Because of the Jays, we made all this money?’ No. But everybody can read between the lines.”

Would he consider a hometown discount, an innocent rube asked?

“Doesn’t exist,” he said. “Not in my world. In my eyes, I’ve given this organization a five-year hometown discount already.”

Well, make that six, Jose, with a mutual option for more. There was a time when he could have been paid a premium for past performance – does anyone doubt the Blue Jays would have signed Bautista for four years and, say, $90 million a year ago? Five years and $100 million?

It always feels a bit hollow to chortle when an athlete gets their comeuppance.

After all, their careers are incredibly fragile things, achieved against stunning odds. The days of mom-and-pop operations in big-time sports are long gone, replaced by big businesses looking to leverage every dollar they can. Players are only being wise when they take a dispassionate view of their market value and how to maximize it.

But pull that curtain back at your peril. A year ago Bautista didn’t just pull it back, he delivered a Power Point presentation tying his performance — well, he was arguing on behalf of the Blue Jays, but let’s acknowledge he wasn’t stumping on behalf of Josh Donaldson or Encarnacion — to the financial performance of a $20-billion business. It was bold, but absurd.

Say what you want about Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins, but it is to their credit that under considerable public pressure they didn’t take seriously Bautista’s reported demands for a five-year, $150-million contract back then.

Whether they should have been more proactive this off-season and begun a more aggressive retooling of a top-heavy and expensive roster — how much mileage can they expect out of Troy Tulowitzki and Russell Martin, and for how much longer? — will be another story. It could very well be proven that this was the winter to pull the bandage off quickly, rather than keep patching things over with the likes of Kendrys Morales.

But it’s clear that for all his self-professed financial acumen Bautista badly misread the market; the breadth and depth of the arrogance is almost laughable with 12 months of hindsight.

Once the fizz goes out of a stock, it can fall fast, the air rushing out of the balloon at a rate disproportionate to its actual value.

That’s the place Jose Bautista Inc. found itself this off-season. The IPO went flat.

The return of one of the Blue Jays’ iconic players should be a cause for unreserved celebration and there’s little doubt that Bautista returning brightens a blah week in January. But it will be interesting to watch what happens if Bautista plays more like an injury-prone 36-year-old this coming season than the ageless wonder he believes himself to be. Will there be a clamour to keep him around then? Or relief that the Blue Jays’ commitment doesn’t extend past 2017?

For the past year Bautista has made his relationship with the Blue Jays about money and value and a cold, hard calculation of what he can contribute.

It was a mistake on his part. If you want to get paid like a franchise icon, you should first act like one.

Once you make it about numbers, that’s what defines you. And right now Bautista is about one year and $18-million.

The market will decide the rest.

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