TORONTO — Three-and-a-half hours before game time Friday, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. stood before the media backdrop outside the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse and tried to make amends. For roughly 12 minutes, as teammates glanced over on their way to or from the adjacent gym, he sounded a different note than he did Wednesday, when the tone-deaf comments he made to Veronica Batista of Noticias Telemicro about receiving his $500-million deal for what he’d already done first went viral, apologizing before a throng of media, explaining that it wasn’t what he’d meant to say, even if he didn’t clarify what he meant to get across, and vowing “to make my contract a great one.”

In a season gone horribly sour for him and his team, the whole scene was one more swig of vinegar, sitting uneasily amid all the accumulated bile. How this all gets digested depends on how Guerrero performs in the years to come, but during Friday’s 6-5 win over the Cincinnati Reds, a crowd of 42,535 gave him a lukewarm welcome each time he stepped up to the plate: mostly cheers, some boos. Fans jeered in the first inning when he beat a ball into the ground two feet from the plate and was tagged by catcher Jose Trevino, and again in the fifth when Nick........

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