Out with the old, in with the new.
The saying applies as much to baseball as it does to life and on Friday night - during the first of three final dates between the
Blue Jays and
Yankees at historic Yankee Stadium - it was all too appropriate.
Fans and players alike will spend the next month preparing a final goodbye to the Cathedral of Baseball, but the opener in the last tangle between longtime division rivals also just happened to be highly touted Jays prospect Travis Snider's first hello.
Snider made his Major League debut in Friday's 2-1 loss, getting the start in left field and thus marking the fourth level of professional baseball he's stopped at during a hectic 2008, his sixth since joining the organization in 2006.
Sufficed to say nothing during stints in Dunedin, New Hampshire and Syracuse could compare with the feeling of tagging a Carl Pavano pitch into deep centre for a ground-rule double and his first Major League hit in his second at-bat and scoring his first run and the team's only score minutes later.
"It's unbelievable. Just the timing of everything, you couldn't ask for a better situation," Snider later acknowledged. "It's been a dream of mine to play here since I knew what Yankee Stadium was."
The rook also made a difficult grab on a tailing fly ball off the bat of Jason Giambi two innings earlier, wading deep into the left field corner near the seats in a ballpark where fans are rarely shy when it comes to opposing players. So did you notice a difference in atmosphere, Travis?
"I'd say so," he joked. "Coming from Triple-A where we were lucky to get 10,000 a game ... to come out here, the Big Apple, this is the Big Show."
Of course it wasn't all roses and rock-solid contact. Snider struck out looking with a chance to tie the game in the seventh, causing the sell-out crowd of more than 53,000 to erupt in applause. But hey, it's New York. Everybody's got to take their licks.
"I got good pitches to hit, got ahead in the count, and just didn't pull the trigger," he later admitted.
Still, not bad for a shaggy-haired kid who's all of 20 years old, and considering he wasn't supposed to see Major League duty at all this year it's also pretty sweet timing from a historical perspective.
He could start 162 games in 2009, but it wouldn't get the burgeoning left-handed slugger a chance to dig his cleats into the dirt and carpet of the House That Ruth Built.
But doing that, even for three little games in the twilight of another luke warm Blue Jays season could pay dividends down the road both in the short term and long.
There's no other place in baseball like Yankee Stadium and even if it doesn't make you a better player, it certainly makes you a tougher one.
And Blue Jays fans can look forward to that. Because Travis Snider got to play at Yankee Stadium. And if he can make it there, well, you know.
aaron.miller@citynews.ca
Five things about the famous ballpark you never knew:
- Yankee Stadium was completed in just 284 working days.
- The stadium's largest single-season attendance was 4,271083 in 2007.
- Yankee Stadium was the site of the first all-star game ever played on July 6, 1933.
- Yankee Stadium was the first ballpark to be called a "stadium."
- At the time the land was purchased for the purpose of stadium construction, a lumber yard sat in a vacant area of the Bronx some referred to as "Goatville."
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CityNews In New York: Blue Jays Out On A High In Yankee Stadium Finale
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CityNews In New York: The Classic Characters Of Yankee Stadium
CityNews In New York: David Eckstein Waves Goodbye To Jays, Yankee Stadium On Same Day
CityNews In New York: Jays Bask In Classic Comeback After Penultimate Yankee Stadium Tilt
CityNews In New York: A Closer Look At The New Yankee Stadium
CityNews In New York: Jays Gem Travis Snider Has Dream Debut At Yankee Stadium