Jose Bautista to be the star of the Mid-Summer Classic – MLB News
Toronto Blue Jays’ slugger Jose Bautista is making an appearance in Major League Baseball’s widely watched and sensational show – the Mid-summer Classic. The star player who came from nowhere last year with his 54 home-runs in the MLB constitutes a powerful
influence now.
However, his rise has been curiously, if not amazingly, unnoticed. While the immensely talented player won his team several glories all this while, there was barely the kind of limelight a baseball player is usually accompanied by.
"It's a remarkable story," former Blue Jays’ catcher Gregg Zaun said. "It's not like he's gone from hitting 15 to 30. He's gone from hitting 15 to 50 and he's on pace to do it again. He's matured into a complete hitter, able to maintain a consistent level
of performance that I have never seen before.”
So phenomenally quiet was the rise that an otherwise influential magazine published an article last year that titled: 'Jose Bautista: The Best Baseball Player You've Never Heard Of'.
His fame and the prodigious talent have undeniably been recognized now with no hugely infallible evidence than his appearance on the Mid-Summer Classic.
However, there is a growing, but equally latent, hearsay – if not widespread rumour, that the player’s talent alone has not contributed to his ascent.
Having 82 homers as now, Bautista has perhaps not failed to attract incredible interest in how he has been able to demonstrate this remarkable consistency. Steroid scandals that have hit other players have not cast a pall of doom on him, yet. However, its
arrival cannot be dismissed.
"Perception is reality and when people see a journeyman player they've never heard of all of a sudden lead the majors in home runs for almost two years in a row, they perceive that steroids played a role in that "immediate" success,” Matt Delzell, a director
in a celebrity endorsement division said.
It has not happened yet and it may not probably happen any time soon. For now, the real focus is the unwanted man’s sudden arrival, poised journey and meteoric rise. It would be tragedy if he was found to be involved in anything unprofessional.
Bautista, it’s worth mentioning, is appearing in the show with 7,454,753 votes in fan balloting, that is way more than the previous record of 6,069,688 that the Seattle Mariners’ Ken Griffey Jr. had got in 1994.
Bautista is not a player of ordinary type. He is said to weigh even the supposedly small details, invests time on watching tapes of pitchers to analyse the pitchers. This alone, if not his inherent talent, has guaranteed his marvellous excellence.
It will be interesting to see how Bautista performs at the All-Star game, as the fans are looking forward to his big hitting.
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