They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but it was stiflingly hot in St. Louis today and I imagine revenge was not the foremost thing on Scott Seabol’s mind when he was called upon to pinch-hit in the bottom of 7th inning with a man on and the Birds on the short end of a 2-1 score.

Still, the first-pitch homer off Tanyon Sturtze that Seabol deposited deep into the left-field seats for his first major league round-tripper had to provide at least some small measure of vindication after Joe Torre’s having him languish for three weeks on the Yankees bench after he made the opening day roster in 2001. Seabol did play: he was used exactly once in his stay with the Yankees, popping out as a pinch-hitter in a blowout win over the Blue Jays.

It’s been quite an odyssey for Seabol in getting to the point where he could deliver the go-ahead pinch home run against the Yankees in front of 50,000-plus screaming fans in a sold-out Busch Stadium. Seabol was the 1,716th player selected in the 1996 draft, and if that sounds like a late pick, well, it was: no player selected that low (88th round) had ever played a day in the major leagues. His lone Yankee at bat came after five years in the minors, including three straight at A-level Greensboro. Following his demotion two weeks after his at bat, Seabol spent the rest of 2001, then three more full seasons in the minors, and had been released by Milwaukee before the Cardinals signed him, at age 28, to a Triple-A contract in May 2003.

Seabol hit well at Memphis in '03 (.300/.376/.534) and again last year (.304/.356/.539), and, this year, after Scott Rolen ran into the Great Wall of South Korea a month into the season, Seabol, more than four years after his debut, finally got another chance in The Show.

Today, the timing of Seabol’s hit was impeccable, as the suddenly offensively challenged Cardinals (shut out twice in three games) had scored just two runs in their previous twenty innings and just couldn’t seem to get that big hit with runners on.

I half expected (probably more like three-quarters expected) to see Seabol bunting in the one-out, man-on-first, down-by-a-run-late situation. I imagine that Seabol doesn’t have much of a history as a bunter, but hey, Tony has Edmonds lay down the occasional sac so why not?

I hope that Seabol’s at bat provides an example to TLR on the advantages of swinging away with a runner at first in a game with more than three outs remaining: the resulting multi-run inning—including two runs that scored after the homer—would have had far less of a chance of occurring had Seabol bunted, and given that Posada homered for New York in the 8th, the Cardinals needed multiple runs to win.

So congrats, Scott—your hit gave the Birds series wins in each of their three interleague encounters to date, and prevented the red-hot Cubs from gaining any ground over the weekend.