By this point in a typical winter, officials are readying to give themselves and the rest of the baseball industry the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, the offseason’s most pertinent business already tended to. Maybe a few free agents of consequence remain, their agents trying to squeeze out a couple extra dollars from teams with holes, but by and large the heavy lifting is done.

At this juncture, where bidding wars are rare, it becomes more about a player and team coming to an understanding they’re made for one another. It happened Thursday with Edwin Encarnacion and the Cleveland Indians. And it could again with Jose Bautista and the Toronto Blue Jays.

There is some wishful thinking involved here, because the Blue Jays are an almost unbendingly pragmatic organization. And that’s a compliment. Teams that map out a plan and remove emotion from it often make better decisions. When the presence of need and cost effectiveness complement that emotion, though, the best organizations recognize some intangible value exists in reminding their fan base the players with whom they formed what feels like an unbreakable bond actually do matter and aren’t fundamentally replaceable.

Bautista is that player. He is this incarnation of the Blue Jays. He is the bat flip, the single greatest moment in Canadian baseball history since Joe Carter, and right up there for the best sports moment of the last 25 years next to Sidney Crosby’s golden goal. He may no longer be everything he has been, but everything he has been is spectacular enough to wonder why it’s Christmas and he’s still a free agent.

His case, actually, is quite fascinating. Bautista’s on-paper detriments are obvious. He is 36, old for a free agent. He is coming off an injury-hampered season that was his worst in more than seven years. He turned down the Blue Jays’ $17.2 million qualifying offer, so it will cost the team that signs him a first-round draft pick. It’s like the worst game of Press Your Luck ever, with a guy yelling “Big Bucks!” and getting a bunch of Whammies.

According to sources, Jose Bautista is willing to accept a one-year deal with Toronto, but there’s a catch. (Getty Images) More

And with the glut of those whose markets overlap in at least one circle of his Venn diagram – Mike Napoli, Mark Trumbo, Brandon Moss, Colby Rasmus, Michael Saunders, Chris Carter and plenty more – Bautista has found free agency particularly inhospitable. He keeps waiting for the Blue Jays to step up. They haven’t.

Whether they should certainly is disputable. The fears about Bautista are fair. Older players are risky. They have trouble staying healthy. Bautista is right-handed and the lineup desperately could use another left-handed hitter. And this could be the big one: According to sources, while Bautista is willing to accept a one-year deal, he wants it to be at a higher value than the qualifying offer.

With Bautista, respect is paramount – it’s what makes him such an emotional and combustible on-field figure – and even though the Blue Jays organization owes him nothing of the sort, president Mark Shapiro and GM Ross Atkins do understand people. And they know a pissed-off Jose Bautista is not the sort of person worth having around. Every team knows this. It’s why Bautista’s salary in the end will be more reasonable than expected of someone in this market.

It’s not altogether prudent to play chicken with the only possible high-on-base hitter left in free agency. Even last season, as he struggled, Bautista managed the third-highest walk rate in baseball behind Mike Trout and Bryce Harper. An .817 OPS in a bad season will play, especially when the Blue Jays’ current outfield consists, left to right, of Melvin Upton Jr., Kevin Pillar and Ezequiel Carrera. Or, better put, a guy who couldn’t crack the Mendoza Line with Toronto last year, a guy with a career OPS below .700 and a guy whose career OPS+ of 83 puts him well below-average.

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