The world runs on mutual options. If you go on a first date, it comes with a mutual option to go on a second if you both so desire. In fact, right now, you and I have a mutual option to go on a date tomorrow. What will you wear to our date? No need to decide, because I'm declining my half of the mutual option.

This is just how we live: We have freedom and liberty and we get to choose, individually, whether to do things together. Business transactions start as mutual options. Conversations are mutual options. Life itself is a mutual option, between us and our fate. But only in baseball, weirdo baseball, does the mutual option get written down, as it did last week, when Jose Bautista and the Toronto Blue Jays agreed to a one-year contract with a mutual option for a second year. Or, in other words, a one-year contract.

It's worth asking: What's up with mutual options? These options, typically tacked on to the end of a deal, can be declined by either party when the year in question comes. There is no downside. There is, consequently, very little upside for obvious reasons: If one party stands to benefit relative to the market, the other party stands to lose. And will thus decline the option.

There have been scores of these clauses tucked into major league contracts, though, which raises many questions: Why are we still seeing this phenomenon? What's the point? Does one side actually benefit? Can both? Let's start at the beginning.

The mutual option did not enter baseball parlance until 1992. Even then, it was not American baseball, but rather a team in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball league, the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes, that gave former big leaguer Alvin Davis a contract that included a "mutual" option. The quotation marks are from the original report, as this novel contract feature was still something that needed to be set off by punctuation. Five years later, when major league pitcher Ken Hill and the Texas Rangers signed a deal with a mutual option, it was still being referred to as "rare."

But between Davis and Hill came Rick Aguilera, the great relief pitcher with the Minnesota Twins. The evidence suggests that Aguilera and the Twins agreed to what was likely the first MLB contract with a mutual option in February 1993. The deal, a contract extension, locked up Aguilera for two years and $7.51 million, after which the Twins could agree to pay him $4 million for a third year. If they picked up the option, Aguilera had 10 days to accept. If either party declined, so long.

Free agency was still relatively young at that point -- less than two decades old -- which made it a fertile era for teams and agents to plant newly imagined contract details: escalator clauses, performance bonuses, playing-time incentives and various options -- club options, vesting options, etc.

"It's the suck-in-your-gut of contract clauses, just convincing enough to fool somebody walking past in a hurry."

The Twins' GM who negotiated the deal, Andy MacPhail, had already made a bit of slightly less boring history two years earlier, when he pioneered the player option. In that case, he gave Jack Morris a three-year deal worth $9 million. But Morris could opt out after one year, and he did, becoming a free agent and signing a bigger deal with the Blue Jays.

"I think they say necessity is the mother of invention," MacPhail, now president of the Phillies, told ESPN.com in a recent conversation. "At that time, you were starting to have clubs that had significantly more wherewithal than others did. In the early stages of free agency, clubs were feeling their way along and trying to figure out the best way to maneuver through it. We had a talented group of players and we had to come up with ways to keep them or attract them, and I think that was the motivation behind it."