‘It felt amazing.’ Santiago Espinal was feeling the love from Blue Jays fans in return to Toronto

Santiago Espinal’s return home was a great success, with his new team, the Cincinnati Reds, taking two out of three from the Blue Jays at Rogers Centre.
The 29-year-old drove in the go-ahead run for his new team in the Blue Jays’ 11-7 loss on Wednesday, drawing a bases-loaded walk off Erik Swanson in the fifth inning to break a 6-6 tie. 
The Reds overcame an early 6-0 deficit, built on three Jays’ homers — a leadoff shot by George Springer in the first inning, a two-run blast by Spencer Horwitz later in the frame and a three-run jack by Ernie Clement in the third.
Traded at the end of spring training as a result of a roster crunch — Espinal’s right-handed-hitting skill set was redundant to a team that had signed Isiah Kiner-Falefa and felt it needed to keep the out-of-options Clement — Toronto finally got the chance to say goodbye to the former all-star in Monday’s series opener, and responded with a standing ovation as he came to the plate for the first time.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” said Espinal in an interview that will air on Thursday’s new episode of Deep Left Field, the Star’s baseball podcast. “The way the fans showed love to me, it was amazing. It got me nervous, but also gave me confidence through my at-bat, too.”
Enough confidence to lace a double into the left field corner and eventually come around to score on an Elly De La Cruz sacrifice fly in an eventual 6-3 Reds win.
The ovation built slowly, but once Espinal got into the batters’ box, Jays’ catcher Alejandro Kirk stepped away from home plate and pitcher Kevin Gausman backed off the mound, allowing the former all-star to enjoy the moment as the 25,603 in attendance got up off their feet to welcome back their beloved former Jay.
“It felt amazing,” said Espinal, who waved and tipped his helmet, first to the crowd and then to the Jays’ dugout. “It’s amazing that my ex-teammates and coaches got up (onto the top step of the dugout) and clapped for me … They showed the love and it means a lot.”
Espinal debuted for the Jays in the COVID season of 2020, playing the first 26 games of his career with no fans in the stands.
He was a big part of the best Jays team of the Guerrero/Bichette era, setting career highs by batting .311 with a .376 on-base percentage and .405 slugging percentage in 2021 with a team that tore a swath through its opponents over the final two months.
“Everybody knew it,” said Espinal about that ‘21 team that missed the post-season by a single game. ”(Nobody wanted) to play us … because of the lineup that we had, the type of players that we had, the type of leaders that we had. Marcus Semien. You got Bo, you got Vladdy. All three of them had a good year. You got George (Springer), you got Teo(scar Hernandez), you got (Lourdes) Gurriel (Jr.), you’ve got so many options to play with. It was a great team.”
A standout memory is the Jays’ first home game back after almost two years on the road on July 30, 2021, in front of an as-many-as-were-allowed crowd of 13,446.
“I remember coming out of centre field,” Espinal recalled of that long-awaited home opener, in which he hauled in the final out with a bare-handed catch in shallow left field. “I got very emotional because it also felt like it was my debut that day — playing for the first time in Toronto after all that happened with COVID and all that stuff.”
The next year, Espinal was an all-star, but his performance has declined precipitously since that midsummer classic. He posted a .643 OPS the rest of that season, dropped to .644 last year and saw that number fall all the way to .496 as recently as July 8 of this season before going on a second-half surge.
He leaves with the greatest revenge — being on a team with a shot at the post-season as the one that traded him away wallows in the cellar.