Blue Jays' Jose Bautista on baseball's divide: 'We need to open our minds'

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Jose Bautista wore a shirt featuring the words “Toronto vs. Everybody’’ as he answered questions from reporters after Saturday’s come-from-ahead loss in the American League Championship Series.

At times it must feel more like Bautista vs. Everybody.

The Toronto Blue Jays right fielder is participating in the playoffs for the first time in his 12-year career, and he’s burning with an intensity that shows in his body language on the field, whether reacting to umpires’ calls or celebrating the franchise’s biggest home run since Joe Carter’s World Series-clinching blast in 1993.

Now, as the series moves to Toronto with the Kansas City Royals ahead 2-0, the Blue Jays hope a return to the site of this postseason’s most electrifying moment will help spark a turnaround in their fortunes.

They were shut out by Edinson Volquez and the Royals’ bullpen in Game 1 and then wasted David Price’s masterful six innings in Game 2, when a misplay by second baseman Ryan Goins on a pop fly between him and Bautista opened the door for Kansas City to overcome a 3-0 deficit.

Changing venues to the hitter-friendly Rogers Centre certainly won’t intimidate those never-say-die Royals, who have turned late-inning comebacks into their playoff MO. But it certainly provides a more comfortable setting for the majors’ most explosive offense, which produced a mere three runs in the first two games at Kauffman Stadium.

Toronto tied for the best home record in the AL at 53-28 this season, including a 23-8 mark after a series of transformative trades in late July.

“I expect it to be loud,’’ Blue Jays catcher Russell Martin said. “We’re going to try to feed off that just the way Kansas City did over here.’’

Toronto proved it’s not merely a hockey town when the streaking Blue Jays drew capacity crowds in 20 of their final 21 home games, although the fans at Rogers Centre did not cover themselves in glory when they littered the field with beer cans and other debris during emotionally charged moments of Game 5 of the division series against the Texas Rangers.

Bautista’s colossal home run and emphatic bat flip sent the crowd into euphoria, and it was fitting he would be the one to cap their comeback from a 2-0 series disadvantage. During the latter part of the Blue Jays’ 22-year absence from the playoffs, the six-time All-Star and two-time home run champion was the player who kept them relevant.

Much like franchise icon Carlos Delgado before him, Bautista has embraced Toronto’s cosmopolitan vibe and emerged as an articulate spokesman in English and Spanish on baseball and other topics.

When then-ESPN commentator Colin Cowherd made disparaging remarks in July about the mental capacity of players from the Dominican Republic, saying baseball couldn’t be that complicated if they play it, Dominican-born Bautista responded with a forceful tweet through his @JoeyBats19 account, which has 830,000 followers.

Cowherd was eventually taken off the air a week before he was supposed to leave ESPN.

Bautista shared with Paste BN Sports his thoughts on the aftermath of the bat flip heard around the continent, saying he wasn’t surprised it took such enormous proportions because, “I understand controversy sells, and this year the topic of cultural differences and the unwritten rules has been coming up.’’

Indeed, less than two weeks before that, a Paste BN Sports story revealed that in 87% of baseball’s benches-clearing incidents in the last five years the main antagonists came from different ethnic backgrounds.

Rangers pitcher Sam Dyson, who threw the fateful pitch Bautista deposited deep into the Rogers Centre stands to put Toronto ahead 6-3 in a heated seventh inning of Game 5, took offense to the exaggerated bat flip.

The ensuing incidents — the dugouts emptied twice in the last two innings — set off an international discussion about baseball and culture.

“I believe the game is globalizing,’’ Bautista said. “It’s getting influenced by cultures from different parts of the world, and we need to open our minds. We need to accept the differences. Differences are good.

“All those territorial rules and the idea that, ‘I’m this way, and we don’t accept anything else here,’ that’s in the past.

“I think we’re living a pivotal part of history when it comes to that. Before it was all about domination and emphasis in territories. I think the world is becoming a melting pot where people want to learn about new cultures, they want to live in different places, they travel a lot. We have to learn to accept that baseball is being played at a high level in many parts of the world, and those players are coming to the major leagues.’’

Monday, on Bautista’s 35th birthday, the ALCS is coming to Toronto for the first time in 22 years. This former baseball vagabond, who once played for four different teams in the same year, would like nothing more than to provide more thrills to the city where he has found a home.

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