Blue Jays best pitching repertoire: Building the ultimate pitcher

What if you could build the ultimate Blue Jays pitcher with the best fastball, curveball, slider, and other offerings in franchise history? Let’s have some fun and speculate on what that fantasy pitcher could look like.

With all of the Top 10 lists, and “Best of” lists that are floating around social media lately, it got me thinking about an equally “useful” question.

If you could combine the best pitches in Blue Jays history, what would that pitcher look like? Meaning, if you took the best fastball we’ve ever seen in the uniform, and combined it with the pitcher with the best slider, and so on, how devastating would that pitcher be? And even more interesting to debate, which hurlers would hold the distinction of having the best pitch in franchise history?

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but in case I haven’t explained the scenario well enough yet, imagine it works like this with some non-Blue Jays. Say you take Randy Johnson‘s fastball, combine it with Pedro Martinez‘s change-up, Mariano Rivera‘s cutter, and R.A. Dickey‘s knuckleball (kidding), and you would have a pretty remarkable pitcher.

In this scenario we’re going to look at the best of the best when it comes to Blue Jays pitchers throughout franchise history. For the sake of keeping things interesting, I decided to only allow one pitch per pitcher, meaning that our most recent Hall of Fame inductee can’t top the list for more than one offering, even if he likely does in reality.

With all of that in mind, let the debate big about how to build the best pitcher in Blue Jays history, and who had the best pitches to make that up.

Slider

A good, hard slider can be as devastating a pitch as any in baseball, and the Blue Jays have had a lot of good ones over the years. That said, I don’t think anyone has had a better slide-piece than Dave Stieb.

For the younger readers in the crowd, Stieb was generally considered to be the best starting pitcher in Blue Jays history until Halladay came along. There’s also a good argument that he should have had much more serious Hall of Fame consideration when he was eligible, but that’s a topic for another day.

For now we’re talking about his slider, and it was flat-out nasty. Unfortunately we don’t have the same data available from that era that we can look at today, but the eye test will do an awful lot in this case. If you’ve never witnessed it for yourself, check out this nice little compilation from youtube user “halladaycelebrate”.

Stieb spent the bulk of his career in a Blue Jays’ uniform, pitching in Toronto from 1979-1992 before making four starts with the Chicago White Sox in 1993 to wrap things up. However, after not pitching for four seasons, he returned to make 19 appearances with the Blue Jays in 1998 as well.

The 7x All-Star finished his career with a 176-137 record, a 3.44 ERA and a 1.245 WHIP across parts of 16 seasons. I wish I had more data to support choosing his slider, and it wasn’t easy passing on the offerings from guys like Ken Giles, Tom Henke, and even Roberto Osuna, but I’m going with Stieb on this one.

Change-up

I tried my best to avoid recency bias when making this selection. I read as much as I could about the change-ups from other Blue Jays’ pitchers of the past, and tried to find an argument wherever I could. I even really wanted to give this pitch to Jimmy Key, who is about as underrated as they come in Blue Jays’ lore.

But I don’t think we’ve ever seen a better change-up in Toronto than the one that Marco Estrada was throwing just a few years ago.

It was the type of offering that made his fairly mediocre fastball turn into a quality pitch. Since opposing batters had to account for that change-up, and had a tough time hitting it even when they were sitting on it, suddenly his 89-91 mile per hour fastball looked a lot more intimidating, especially when he threw it up in the zone.

Back in 2015, hitters posted a batting average of just .185, and then Estrada followed it up by holding them to just .159 against his change-piece in 2016, according to Baseball Savant. And again, because hitters had to account for the devastating pitch, his fastball was very effective as well, holding them to just a .194 average against his four-seamer in 2015 for example.

The veteran has dealt with a variety of back issues in recent years, and unfortunately it pushed him into retirement ahead of the 2020 campaign. Thankfully the Blue Jays got the best of him while he was healthy though, and we’ll always remember that nasty change-up.

Curveball

I can already hear some of you saying that I should have Halladay here, and you wouldn’t be wrong to feel that way. However, I made the “one pitch per pitcher” rule earlier, so I’m going to stick to it. Plus, we’ve already talked about Halladay.

I considered some recent examples, such as Brett Cecil, or Aaron Sanchez, both of whom had an excellent ‘”hook” at times in their Blue Jay careers. Thinking back to the Halladay era, I was reminded of how good A.J. Burnett‘s curveball was when he was healthy, which unfortunately wasn’t often enough. I also considered a former Cy Young Award winner in Pat Hentgen, who had a pretty good curveball of his own.

In the end, I decided to go against my Twitter poll (although Halladay did get the nod there) and I’m going with the “Uncle Charlie” from David Wells. The southpaw started his career with the Blue Jays and was there from 1987-92, and returned again later on for two seasons from 1999-2000. Despite the fact that he was an imposing physical figure on the mound, Wells was more reliant on his movement and his control, especially his big overhand curveball.

He was a valuable pitcher for the Blue Jays early in his career, but he was at his best in 2000 when he finished 3rd in AL Cy Young award voting. That season he was 20-8 with a 4.11 ERA and a 1.293 WHIP across 229.2 innings, also earning one of his three All-Star selections, and even a few MVP votes.

As you’ll see in the video above, Wells was probably at his best in a Yankee uniform, even if he had more than a few productive seasons with the Blue Jays as well. He was often underrated, and for the purposes of this exercise, his curveball would definitely help build this fictional pitcher we’re working on here.

Bonus Pitch

The most common repertoire for pitchers would be fastball, change-up, slider, and likely a curveball, but there are plenty of other quality offerings out there too. The Blue Jays have enjoyed quite a few over the years as well, whether it was R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball, Tom Henke’s forkball, or several other less frequently used pitches at the big league level.

For all of the quality options, I can’t think of a better one than the splitter that Rogers Clemens used to terrorize hitters with throughout his career. I also have to give a hat tip to @richardbirfs for reminding me that this was (in my opinion) the obvious choice.

Clemens actually won my poll for the fastball, but I decided to use Halladay there, which allowed me to add the “Rocket’s” filthy splitter as the fifth pitch. It’s technically a fastball as well, so I suppose I could have put him in the first category, but it feels like an offering that’s worthy of it’s own place in the repertoire.

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The pitch became one of Clemens’ go-to offerings, and helped him become one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history. He sits third on the all-time strikeout list behind just Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson, and the splitter was frequently used as his out pitch. That’s because it was nearly untouchable most of the time.

As a Blue Jay, Clemens was ridiculously dominant, going 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA, a 1.061 WHIP, and 563 strikeouts across 498.2 innings. He won the Cy Young award in both 1997 and 1998 before he was traded to the New York Yankees at his request, which actually brought David Wells back to Toronto. Of course, he wasn’t just using that splitter as a Blue Jay and even a Yankee, as he ended up pitching in parts of 24 seasons, going 354-184 with 4672 career strikeouts.

That brings us to the end of the assembly of our ultimate Blue Jays pitcher, so let’s recap. We’ll have the fastball (both cutter and sinker) from Roy Halladay, Marco Estrada’s change-up, Dave Stieb’s slider, David Wells’ curveball, and Clemen’s splitter. If such a pitcher ever showed up in real life, I can’t even imagine how much they would dominate.