Snider teased Toronto with his talent
Travis Snider, who announced his retirement from baseball on Instagram last week, was supposed to be the Blue Jays’ next great slugger.
The baby-faced outfielder arrived in the big leagues at the end of August 2008, just 20 years old and only two years removed from being drafted 14th overall out of a suburban Seattle high school. He hit .301 in his first taste of the majors and flashed a left-handed swing that was easy to dream on. And dream we did.
The next season, Snider broke camp with the Jays, starting in left field on opening day. He doubled in his first at-bat and launched an opposite-field home run in his second, both off Detroit’s Justin Verlander.
A week later in Minnesota, the rookie homered twice to raise his OPS for the season to 1.245, helping the Jays to a 6-2 start. Sonnets were being composed in praise of the youngster, who really did seem like the complete package with a warm personality, a self-deprecating sense of humour and an unabashed love for food — especially grilled meats — that endeared him to the fan base in the early years of social media.
The sky seemed to be the limit but, after that big game, Snider sat for three of the next four because the Jays were facing left-handed starters and the rookie was being platooned, usually with veteran Kevin Millar.
His bat cooled off mightily over those four days as he struggled to understand why he was on the bench. Snider hit just .211 with two extra-base hits, both doubles, over the next five weeks, leading to a three-month trip to Triple-A Las Vegas.
Snider came back relaxed, refreshed and more mature, he said, feeling more capable of handling the ups and downs of major-league life, but his star would never again shine as brightly as it did during those early days.
It felt like every time things were starting to turn his way, something would go wrong. The Jays stuck with Snider after a rough April in 2010, and it paid off with him hitting .378 with a .711 slugging percentage in the first half of May. But a wrist injury sidelined him until the end of July, by which time Fred Lewis had muscled his way into the leftfield job, forcing an odd platoon of two left-handed hitters for the rest of the season.
Snider could be his own worst enemy, as well.
In the early days of his career, he bristled at suggestions from thenmanager Cito Gaston and allowed decisions about his place on the roster and in the lineup to affect his mental state.
He wound up scuffling through another season and a half — riding the shuttle to and from Vegas or the injured list, or both — battling for playing time with another young left-handed slugger, Eric Thames, until they were both traded at the 2012 deadline.
Snider was removed midgame when he was dealt to Pittsburgh for reliever Brad Lincoln.
He was called off the field in his native Seattle by manager John Farrell and replaced in the outfield by catcher Yan Gomes. Thames, who was in Las Vegas at the time, was sent to Seattle for reliever Steve Delabar.
The Jays were very happy to get Lincoln for Snider, a telling sign of how much the still-young outfielder’s value had fallen across the industry. Lincoln’s greatest claim to fame as a Jay is that he was the inspiration for manager John Gibbons’ “you can’t walk the world” quote. That came after a May 2013 outing against the Rays, in which Lincoln came in with two on and two out in a tie game in the bottom of the 10th inning and proceeded to walk both batters he faced, forcing in the winning run.
Snider eventually got the chance to play in Pittsburgh, getting into 140 games in 2014, though he only started 71 of them. He hit 264 and drove in 38 runs, and his 13 home runs were one shy of the careerhigh 14 he hit with the Jays in 2010.
Two years later, he was out of the major leagues for good and wound up playing the rest of his career at Triple-A, finishing up in the Atlanta organization last year with a slash line of 174/.305/.304.
For woebegone Jays fans slogging through what would end up being 22 years between playoff appearances, Snider, now 33, was a brief, shining light in the darkness, carrying the hopes and dreams of better days to come.
It’s a shame that he never became all that we hoped he would be on the field, but 15 years of professional baseball is still quite an achievement.