DELGADO’S TOP 5 BLUE JAYS MOMENTS

“Some of my favourite memories were stuff that didn’t even happen in the game,” Delgado said. “Just messing around with Darrin Fletcher, or hanging out with Jose Cruz or Shawn Green. It’s ordinary stuff, but over the course of years you build extraordinary relationships.” That said, we still asked Carlos to pick his top-5 favourite moments as a Blue Jay. Opening Day, 1994: Delgado officially made his major-league debut the previous fall, but he had just a single at-bat in a pair of games in the season’s final series. So for all intents and purposes, Opening Day in 1994 was his true debut.

The game was at home at the SkyDome, played in front of a sold-out crowd of 50,484, who gathered to watch the Jays return less than six months after Joe Carter’s World Series walk-off.

“It was my first Opening Day in the big leagues,” recalls Delgado, then a 21-year-old rookie who made the team out of spring training as the club’s starting left fielder. “I’ll never forget it.”

Delgado homered in the eighth inning, his first of 336 as a Blue Jay, as Toronto defeated the Chicago White Sox 7-3. The 2000 season: “I will always remember that year,” says Delgado, who hit 41 home runs, led the league with 57 doubles, drove in 137 runs and posted a slash line of .344/.470/.664.

Not only was it arguably his best statistical year, but the Jays were also threatening — at least in the first half of the season — to make a run at the postseason. They were tied for the division lead with the New York Yankees at the allstar break, but couldn’t hold on and fell to third by season’s end.

First all-star game in 2000: Delgado was named to just two allstar teams in his career and never as a starter. His first came in 2000 at Turner Field in Atlanta. In his only at-bat, Delgado battled righthander Darryl Kile through nine pitches before driving a double into right field.

June 25, 2000: It was Delgado’s 28th birthday and he was celebrating in Toronto at the SkyDome in front of 31,022 fans, as well as Pedro Martinez and the Boston Red Sox.

Martinez was nasty that year. His ERA heading into the game was 1.18. He had a WHIP under 1.00, struck out 130 in 99 innings and held opposing batters to a paltry .161 average. He was almost unhittable.

But with the Red Sox up 5-3 in the bottom of the seventh, Delgado stepped up to the plate with two out and Chris Woodward on first. With the count full, he smacked Martinez’s pitch over the wall to tie the game.

“It just felt so good to homer off of him,” says Delgado. “And on my birthday.”

The Jays eventually defeated Boston 6-5 in 13 innings.

Four home run game: On Sept. 25, 2003, against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Delgado became just the 15th player in baseball history to hit four home runs in a single game. (No player has ever hit five.) And Delgado did it in four consecutive at-bats.

When Josh Hamilton did it last year, it was the first time since Delgado’s achievement nearly a decade earlier.

“I got lucky. It’s one of those things,” he said after that game. “I’m not going to try to analyze things.”

(A little trivia: Current Jays’ pitching coach Pete Walker was the Jays’ starter that game.)