Blue Jays one-hit wonder Silver Slugger winners you won’t believe once earned the honour

Major League Baseball's awards season is just around the corner and FanSided (parent company of Jays Journal) has partnered with Louisville Slugger to announce the finalists and the award winners of the 2025 Silver Slugger Awards.
The announcements will be done live on The Baseball Insiders podcast and YouTube show.

The Toronto Blue Jays may have a few nominees this season, but they have certainly had many prolific power hitters in their history who have taken home the prestigious Silver Slugger Award in recognition of their offensive excellence. Some have been no-brainers, when you hear their name they are almost synonymous with winning a Silver Slugger award. However, there have been a surprising number of Blue Jays that managed to received the award based solely on a rare outlier season.

Blue Jays one-hit wonder Silver Slugger winners you won’t believe once earned the honour

1982 Damaso Garcia

During the expansion years when the Blue Jays were working hard to establish a competitive team, rostering elite offensive players were often hard to come by. Nevertheless, in 1982, they had a young, promising second baseman named Damaso Garcia that somehow managed to win the franchise’s first ever Silver Slugger Award.

Garcia took home the honours based on just five home runs and 42 RBIs worth of production from the position. But he did supplement it with a solid .310 average with 54 stolen bases and 89 runs scored in 147 games played that year, so perhaps those stats played a role in it.

Nevertheless, Garcia did end up producing similar numbers in his subsequent four seasons with the Blue Jays, but never won another Silver Slugger Award, making his only win quite the puzzling one.

1983 Lloyd Moseby

As one of the mainstays in the Blue Jays lineup for most of the 1980s, Lloyd Moseby was a permanent fixture in their outfield as well over a decade. But in 1983, he followed in Garcia’s footsteps by surprisingly being recognized as a Silver Slugger winner despite putting up just solid numbers instead of great numbers.

Moseby posted a .315 batting average, .875 OPS, 104 runs scored, 18 home runs and 81 RBIs over 151 games played. He would go on to replicate some of those numbers in his four subsequent seasons with the Blue Jays, with 1987 perhaps being his best of his MLB career, but didn’t end up receiving the honour again. 

1990 Kelly Gruber

With the likes of George Bell and Jesse Barfield capturing most of the offensive spotlight during the late 1980s to power the Jays into perennial contenders at the time, third baseman Kelly Gruber kind of flew under the radar in the process. But after the massive trade of Barfield to the New York Yankees in 1989, Gruber became more on the forefront of the Jays’ offense and finally broke through with a career year in 1990.

That season, Gruber compiled a .274 average, .842 OPS, along with personal bests in runs scored (92), doubles (36), home runs (31) and RBIs (118) over 150 games played to take home the Silver Slugger Award for third base.

However, he was never able to re-establish those numbers as he dropped off considerably in the following seasons and eventually out of the majors after 1993. Nevertheless, despite being a one-hit wonder, he still managed to be a part of the 1992 Jays World Series team before falling out of favour.

2009 Aaron Hill

It will be almost another two decades before the Blue Jays had another surprise Silver Slugger winner. In this case, there was actually two, with one being second baseman Aaron Hill. Selected by the Blue Jays in the first round in the 2003 MLB Draft, it took Hill a while before evolving into a player of relevance for Toronto.

But that time finally came in his breakthrough campaign in 2009 when he put up 103 runs scored, 36 home runs and 108 RBIs while having a .286/.330/.499/.829 slash line, earning him some Silver Slugger hardware.

At the time, Toronto believed that they had finally found their franchise second baseman. However, Hill would fail to come close to those numbers in the rest of his Blue Jays tenure, and eventually the rest of his MLB career in fact.

2009 Adam Lind

The other surprising Silver Slugger winner for the Blue Jays that 2009 campaign was designated hitter Adam Lind. Lind was known to be a solid hitter coming up their farm system at the time, but was not expected to be a massive power producer.

But in 2009, he defied the odds by putting up his best MLB season of his career with a .305 average, .932 OPS, together with 93 runs scored, 46 doubles, 35 home runs and 114 RBIs, forming the bashing tandem with Hill that year.

Similar to his teammate, Lind would never come anywhere close to those numbers again in the seven seasons after, with 26 home runs and 87 RBIs the closest he would ever get. Had both Hill and Lind kept going with their form, along with the eventual additions of José Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion to the club in subsequent years, who knows how much more success the Blue Jays could have had during the 2010s.

However, that never materialized, leaving them as just one-hit Silver Slugger winners as their main memorable moment with the Jays.