TORONTO — Four days of rest, therapy and rehab have eased the tightness in Jose Bautista’s troubled right shoulder, and the Toronto Blue Jays slugger is optimistic the injury can be managed enough to keep him playing through the second half.

While he wouldn’t disclose precisely what the “little more aggressive treatment” he received over the all-star break was, Bautista said it delivered the desired effect.

“I feel great right now and hopefully I can continue to feel like this, even after throwing,” he said Friday before taking on the Tampa Bay Rays.

Bautista withdrew from Tuesday’s all-star game last weekend citing the need to treat his shoulder, which has troubled him since he made a throw in anger against the Baltimore Orioles back in April. That caused a bout of inflammation in the area, which led to an impingement.

A cortisone shot in late May allowed Bautista to resume throwing, but a handful of in-game throws last week in Chicago against the White Sox aggravated matters again, causing tightness. There was concern the tightness could lead to the impingement returning.

“That’s normally how it happens,” he said. “With the tightness comes restricted range of motion, with doing physical activity with restricted physical motion comes irritation and inflammation and with that comes pain from the impingement or whatever else. That’s just where I’m at right now, we know it, so if we can manage it as well as we can, that’s the right way to approach it.”

Bautista said the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as before — “I’m not going to act like I had a knife in my shoulder, it wasn’t like that,” he said — but the all-star break offered the only in-season opportunity for an extended rest. Combined with DH duties last Sunday in Kansas City, he went five days without throwing, and the chance to do that is what led him to skip the all-star game.

“If we could prevent it from getting bad, why not do it? It doesn’t make any sense for me to jeopardize my ability to go out there every day and give it my best for the second half when we had time to make sure we didn’t do that,” Bautista said, adding later: “With rest, this is something that would subside within two to three weeks. I just don’t have the luxury of taking two weeks off right now.”