Looking back at the Blue Jays’ last #HugWatch: So long, Snider
By Ian Hunter
5 years agoIn the pantheon of Blue Jays trades, the Travis Snider for Brad Lincoln swap of 2012 is easily among the least earth-shattering moves in franchise history. But it was meaningful for two reasons; one, it was the end of an era for one of the franchise’s most-hyped prospects.
That trade was also the last #HugWatch to affect the Toronto Blue Jays.
If you missed the trade happen in real-time, you weren’t alone. It took place mid-game as the Blue Jays were out on the west coast playing the Seattle Mariners, in Snider’s home state. The deal went down just after midnight Eastern time, the day before the 2012 non-waiver trade deadline.
In the bottom of the seventh inning, after Snider already went out to left field, John Farrell called him back in from the field and Snider was replaced with Yan Gomes (remember him as a Blue Jay?). Something was up.
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TV cameras caught Snider packing his belongings, hugging his coaches and exiting stage left. Snider shook the hand of pitching coach Brad Arnsberg, hugged bench coach Don Wakamatsu and embraced his manager before walking away for the very last time as a Blue Jay.
The #HugWatch is standard practice leading up to the trade deadline, but to the best of my knowledge, this is the first and last time a Toronto Blue Jays player received the #HugWatch treatment.
Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that Snider was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates for reliever Brad Lincoln. At the time, Alex Anthopoulos was working on a deal for another reliever, dealing Eric Thames for Steve Delabar.
Seunghwan Oh came extremely close to his very own #HugWatch last week as the Blue Jays negotiated his trade mid-game with the Colorado Rockies, but ultimately, Oh and Eugene stuck around long enough to bid their teammates goodbye after the game.
It must be a bizarre experience to learn mid-game that you’ve been traded to another team. You’re out there, just going your job, when your boss informs you that you’ve been dealt to Tyler Chicken for dogs, twists and some kind of fermented chicken drink.
Here’s what Snider told Richard Griffin in this piece from the Toronto Star:
“I hadn’t really been called off the field like that before, so I really didn’t know what’s going on. I thought maybe it was a lineup mistake or something like that. But, you know at this time of the year things are going to happen.I just wanted to get an opportunity to say goodbye to some of those guys. A great group of guys. I’m going to miss them.”
I mentioned it was the “end of an era”, and at the risk of sounding a bit hyperbolic, it really was. Aside from Carlos Delgado, Snider was the Blue Jays’ first true “super prospect”. With the advent of blogs and with social media in its infancy, it was the perfect storm for Jays fans to adopt Snider as the Blue Jays’ next big thing.
From the moment he was drafted 14th overall in the 2006 MLB entry draft, straight out of high school, the Snider hype machine went into overdrive. His meteoric rise through the Blue Jays farm system was unlike anything ever witnessed in the organization.
Snider played all of 18 games at Triple-A before being promoted at the end of August 2008. He was playing High-A ball at the beginning of the season, to Double-A just a few weeks later, to Triple-A four months after that, to The Show three weeks after landing in Triple-A.
Drafted at 18 years old straight out of high school. In Major League Baseball playing with the Toronto Blue Jays under the bright lights at age 20. By today’s standards in MLB, that doesn’t seem out of the norm. Yet, Snider’s rapid ascension up the ranks was unprecedented within the Blue Jays farm system.
Entering the 2008 minor league season, he skyrocketed all the way up to number 11 on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects List. He peaked at number six on the BP Top 100 entering the 2009 season. Scouting reports lauded him for his power and patience at the plate. Like this one from Kevin Goldstein’s BP Top 100 prospect list.
One of the most gifted hitters around, Snider showed the approach of veteran as a 19-year-old, hitting .313 with tons of power coming out of his beefy 245-pound frame.
A little over two years later, Snider made his Major League debut at Yankee Stadium. The next four years were a roller coaster of call-ups, injuries, retooling of swings, demotions and frustrations at the plate for the power-hitting lefty. Six years after selecting him with their first overall pick, the Blue Jays moved on from Snider.
The Snider deal was just one of the many proverbial gut-punches to the Blue Jays’ fan base in 2012. The club lost three of their most promising young starters to significant injuries in the span of one week. There was the Yunel Escobar eyeblack scandal. And then after much speculation about his desire to return to the Red Sox, John Farrell flew the coop for Boston. Trading Snider was a mere footnote in the series of missteps, miscalculations and overall bad luck by the Blue Jays organization in 2012.
Considering how tight-lipped this regime is towards announcing transactions like these, fans will be hard-pressed to witness another Blue Jays #HugWatch on camera in the near future. But whenever I think of the #HugWatch, I’ll always think of Mr. Meats Don’t Clash: Travis Snider.
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