To the surprise of nobody, a pitcher left the Blue Jays and immediately excelled

In the past, the Toronto Blue Jays have had their fair share of players that have come and gone for the ballclub. But more often than not, we would find the player suddenly having better success with their new teams than when they were a Blue Jay. Among those included many pitchers such as Liam Hendriks, Jesse Chavez, and more recently, the likes of Andrew Vazquez, Julian Merryweather and Tayler Saucedo come to mind.

Well, we can tack on one more to the list with the once-promising former Blue Jays pitcher now in Trent Thornton. Thornton made his debut with his new team the Seattle Mariners on Tuesday, while calmly and gracefully produced 2.1 scoreless innings of one-hit ball, while striking out three in the process.

To the surprise of many of the Mariners’ faithful, they were definitely impressed with what he brought with his stuff, judging from some of the reactions found on Twitter.

Some even thought that he could even potentially be the next Paul Sewald for the team.

Albeit it was only one game, but knowing the luck the Blue Jays have had in the past on players they had given up on, they usually end up being some kind of unstoppable force on a new team, or in the case of Steve Pearce, even become the World Series hero for your arch rival Boston Red Sox back in 2018.

But to be fair, we did give Thornton all the opportunities he could have in the past four years to excel in the Jays’ environment, but it just never materialized. As he begins a new chapter in his career with the Mariners, we wish him all the best, but the Jays surely hope that he doesn’t come back to haunt the ballclub some time down the road, especially please not Steve Pearce territory for sure.