J.P. Arencibia's unforgettable All-Star Break

Major League Baseball’s All-Star Break has has produced all kinds of memories for all sorts of players.

For J.P. Arencibia, a guy just trying to find his way back to the bigs after parting ways with the Blue Jays, a call he received during the mid-season classic in 2014 as a member of the Texas Rangers organization was like his Christmas in July.

“I was at home and I got a call from Jon Daniels, and he said, ‘hey, listen man, I just want to let you know that we are going to be bringing you up after this All-Star break. You’ve done everything you need to do to, you know, prove that you’re ready again — so come on back up.”

It just so happened that the Rangers were facing Arencibia’s former club right out of the break, and the reaction of the crowd at the Rogers Centre in Toronto — the city where he spent the first four years of his major-league career — was one he found a little perplexing.

“It was nice to come back. I came back to a lot of boos, which I thought was pretty interesting because I hadn’t really done anything wrong to the fans other than kind of didn’t play good my last. year,” he said.

But Arencibia was able to get the last laugh off a certain former Blue Jays knuckleballer.

“And it was fun because I was able to come back, and I was able to take R.A. Dickey deep that first game back. That was the most memorable to me because I was really in a tough headspace — I was trying to figure out ‘what the heck, man? What am I going to do?'”