By Steph Rogers
SPECIAL TO SPORTSNET.CA
PHOENIX — Aaron Hill is seated in the Diamondbacks dugout at Chase Field prior to a recent home game against the San Diego Padres.
A lot of time has passed – 366 days if you’re counting – since the Visalia, CA native was traded from the Toronto Blue Jays, along with John McDonald, to the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for Kelly Johnson.
The move has resulted in a dramatic change in Hill’s baseball fortunes. In his first 33 games in a Diamondbacks uniform, Hill hit .315. When he left Toronto he was hitting .225. And it turns out the turnaround wasn’t just a result of the adrenaline rush that came from participating last fall in his first pennant race and playoff series.
This season, with his Diamondbacks sitting in third place in the NL West entering play Tuesday, Hill hasn’t let up. His average has been hovering around the .300 mark for the past three months. He hasn’t committed an error since June 30. He’s had 39 multi-hit games and this past Sunday he hit his 20th home run of the season.
On Saturday, seated in the Diamondbacks dugout, Hill jokes that having an ‘easy button’ on the dugout wall might come in handy to come up with the simple answers the media and fans seek to explain his resurgence.
"I don’t know if it’s a fresh start or not, it wasn’t a question for me that it was talent because I knew I could still play," Hill says. "I knew what I was capable of doing, it just wasn’t clicking. A change of scenery, speaking from personal experience, worked out great.
"It’s always tough when you leave the guys you’ve been with for a long time in an organization. At the same time, people always talk about a fresh start to get going again."
Selected with the 13th overall pick in the 2003 draft, the Blue Jays had been the only professional organization Hill had known. The Diamondbacks like what they have seen from him so far.
"The stats don’t really tell you about a person at all, why one year is something and another year is different," explains Diamondbacks hitting coach Don Baylor, who calls Hill a "model student."
"He works hard, he cares. He’s such a good athlete."
The day Hill and McDonald were traded, a press conference was held in Toronto where they were given the opportunity to say good-bye to a city they had both grown to love. More than a year has passed since then, but for McDonald, the memory is still fresh.
"It was difficult to leave Toronto," McDonald says in an interview last week. "There’s more involved than just me changing teams, changing leagues. It’s my wife, my kids, Aaron’s daughter, his wife. I live on the East coast, Aaron lives on the West coast, trying to find new places to live.
"The baseball part of it is baseball – it makes it really easy. We came here and we kept preparing just as we were taught to prepare our whole lives, just as hard as we prepared in Toronto."
Preparing for meaningful September baseball left the pair with no time to worry about the difficulties of moving across the continent. They had joined a pennant race and a clubhouse that welcomed them from Day 1. Hill says they were made to feel like they were at home.
The Diamondbacks aren’t the same team they were a year ago, again leaving Hill in search for that metaphorical easy button.
"Whatever year you’re having, good or bad, it’s a different year," Hill explains. "In our case, it was the first time for a lot of guys to have a playoff run, myself included. I think we expected to come into this year just like we were last year — winning those one-run games, coming back from five or six runs down in the sixth, seventh, eighth inning and it wasn’t happening.
"You dig yourself into a hole, and any time you go that far — whether individually or as a team — trying to dig yourself back out is hard."
This year Hill has been relaxed and productive, thanks in part to some help from former Blue Jays teammate Lyle Overbay.
"This year he’s been unbelievable," McDonald says of Hill. "Lyle Overbay kind of had a bit to do with it. He talked to him a lot about hitting over the first month or two of the season (with Arizona), and helped Aaron get into the right frame of mind.
"Aaron started putting some at-bats together that were right back to where he was in 2009, and he hasn’t let up," McDonald says. "He’s been awesome."
Overbay, who signed a free agent deal with the Diamondbacks last December, was released by the team on August 5.
On June 18 of this year Hill hit for the cycle. Eleven days later, he did it again, making him just the second MLB player to accomplish the feat twice in the same year since 1900.
For the moment, Hill says his focus is on the rest of the regular season, which is why he’ll wait until the season is over before he sits down and watches those two games.
"It was a blast going through, don’t get me wrong, it was fun," he says. "It was pretty neat – I got a Hall of Fame certificate, and they put my cleats in there. I have a reason to go visit (Cooperstown) now.
"It’s fun to see, and to feel success, to do what you know you can do," he adds. "But at the same time, to accomplish something like that, it’ll hit me more when I reflect on it later this year."
