The third and last portion of Travis Snider's interview with Shi Davidi can be found here on Sportsnet.ca.
There was not a lot to glean from this final part, but we do find out that Snider felt that the much-hyped Spring Training competition for the starting left field job was not much of a competition when Thames was repeatedly working out with Jose Bautista and Colby Rasmus while he practiced with the B-team.
Snider, after getting back from a jammed wrist, began to worry again about the prospect of a recall when Rajai Davis took over left field after Eric Thames was optioned:
"I started to slip mentally, saying, ‘What more do I have to do? The guy I lost my job to is in triple-A now, there’s not really a guy there now who in my mind is competing for that job and what are we waiting for?’"
Of course, most Blue Jays fans were thinking the same thing. Snider was hurt again when it was announced that Anthony Gose was recalled after Bautista's injury. At that point, Snider "started to divorce himself from the Blue Jays" and asked his agent whether it would be better if he had a fresh start somewhere else. When he was finally recalled, after the J.A. Happ trade, he got back into things and being a Blue Jay, until he was blindsided again with the trade to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Snider ends with some self-reflection and advice for other players who may be in a similar situation:
"But at the end of the day, they make the decisions, so to sit there and to be frustrated and to allow that to affect your mindset isn’t going to be positive in any way. You can learn, OK maybe I should have done this differently, but if there’s a young player that reads this and gets anything out of it, it’s control what you can control."
I hope that Snider is able to follow his own advice and be able to block those emotions that have affected his focus and his play in the past, and then perhaps he can live up to the expectations that so many have set on him.