Top 5 starting pitchers in Blue Jays franchise history by WAR

Since the inception of the Toronto Blue Jays in 1977, only four franchises in baseball have captured more Cy Youngs than the Jays’ five (the Dodgers, Braves, Red Sox, and Phillies each have six). It’s true. While the Blue Jays have often been known for their sluggers, the fact is, Toronto is actually one of the premier pitching franchises in all of baseball.

Woven into the fabric of this great history are some spectacular names, legends whom Jays fans can probably rattle off upon request. But who, you may be wondering, are the greatest of them all?

This article will count down the top five starting pitchers in Blue Jays franchise history according to Baseball Reference’s WAR. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, and a journey to the top of the mountain.

5. Jim Clancy (24.8 WAR)

It’s fitting that Jim Clancy kicks off this list, just ahead of flashier names like Juan Guzmán and Roger Clemens, since in many ways, Clancy was the guy who laid the foundation for what would become a longstanding franchise strength.

Selected with the sixth pick of the 1976 expansion draft, Clancy had been left unprotected by the Texas Rangers as just another young minor league pitcher who couldn’t find the strike zone. The Jays, however, were willing to overlook this fault due to the noticeable strength which Clancy possessed – the ability to bring the heat. “That boy could throw a ripe strawberry through a locomotive,” Jays pitching coach Bob Miller put it at the time.

(Side note: does this not make you long for a time when scouting reports were not bogged down by an oversaturation of advanced analytics, when talent evaluators looked at simpler things, like what type of fruit a pitcher could throw through what?)

Though Clancy did not suddenly find his control upon joining the organization, issuing 75 walks in 118 Double-A innings and putting up a 4.88 ERA, he was nonetheless called up to the Jays in July of their inaugural 1977 season. It went about as well as anything went for the 107-loss Jays that year, as Clancy finished with a 5.05 ERA.

The next year, however, he was much better, pitching to a 4.09 ERA across 30 starts, and by 1980, Clancy had established himself as a legitimate major league workhorse, throwing up 250.2 innings with a 3.30 ERA in 34 starts, 15 of which he went the distance in.

From there, Clancy became the Blue Jays’ rock, a “tower of strength,” team president Paul Beeston called him. He would ultimately put up more than 2,200 innings across 345 starts in his Blue Jays career, perhaps never among the best pitchers in the league, but an indefatigable workhorse who helped the Jays build from expansion team to contender.

4. Pat Hentgen (26.8 WAR)

There are few names more synonymous with the Toronto Blue Jays franchise than Pat Hentgen. Not only did he have an outstanding run for the team on the mound in the 1990s, but since his retirement, Hentgen has remained in and around the organization in a variety of roles, from part-time pitching coach to ambassador, to special assistant.

Make no mistake though, for a brief stretch in the ‘90s, Hentgen was truly outstanding.

It started in 1993, when injuries pushed the then-24-year-old into the starting rotation for the defending World Series champs. He responded by going 19-9 with a 3.87 ERA, making the All-Star team and finishing sixth in Cy Young voting, then picking up the win in Game 3 of the World Series behind six innings of one-run ball. Hentgen was so good that he was famously scheduled to start the winner-take-all Game 7 before Joe Carter’s Game 6 heroics brought the title back to Toronto.

In ’94, he was an All-Star again, putting up a 3.40 ERA across 24 starts in a strike-shortened season. Though he inexplicably struggled in 1995, pitching to a 5.11 ERA, he would bounce back with his best year in 1996, winning 20 games while leading the league in innings pitched (265.2), complete games (10), shutouts (3), and pitcher WAR (8.6), and finishing second in ERA (3.22) to teammate Juan Guzmán. For his performance, he would earn the first Cy Young in franchise history.

Hentgen would have one final great season in 1997, again making the All-Star team and again leading the league in innings, complete games, and shutouts, before injuries began to get the better of him and his performance fell off a cliff. In the final years of his career, he bounced around from St. Louis to Baltimore, before fittingly returning to the Jays in 2004, where he would retire mid-season in the place it all began.

While Hentgen may not have sat atop the game for long, for a five-year stretch, there were few pitchers more successful, earning him a spot firmly among the top five pitchers in Blue Jays history according to WAR.

3. Jimmy Key (29.7 WAR)

There is a reason Jimmy Key was known as ‘the key to victory’ during his career with the Blue Jays.

Selected in the third round of the 1982 draft out of Clemson, Key broke onto the scene in 1985, putting up the third best ERA in the AL (3.00) as a 24-year-old, and leading the Jays to their first ever postseason appearance.

This was the start of a brilliant eight-year run for Key in which he averaged more than 200 innings per year and pitched to a 3.38 ERA as the Jays won four division titles. The run included Key’s best year in 1987 for the 96-win Jays – arguably the best season a Jays starter has ever had – when he led the league in both ERA (2.76) and WHIP (1.06) while throwing 261 innings, finishing second in the Cy Young race behind the phenom that was the young Roger Clemens.

When the Jays finally broke through and won the World Series in 1992, it was Key who picked up both the third and the fourth wins of the series – first, with 7.2 innings of one-run ball in a 2-1 Game 4 win, and then, as a reliever in the 10th and 11th innings of Game 6.

The key to victory, indeed. Heck, Key even picked up the win in the only All-Star Game ever played in Toronto in 1991.

Through it all, Key got it done as one of the most stereotypically crafty lefties the game has ever seen, a soft-tosser who bamboozled hitters with his mind more so than his arm. Perhaps this should be no surprise, given that his father was an engineer and his mother worked for NASA.

The end result is that Jimmy Key stands as the greatest lefty in Blue Jays franchise history, and, according to WAR, the third best pitcher the team has ever had.

1. Dave Stieb (56.9 WAR)

The story of how Dave Stieb made his way to the Blue Jays is one of those classic baseball tales that make the game so great.

In college, Stieb was not a pitcher, but an All-American slugger at Southern Illinois University. One day in 1978, two Jays scouts appeared at a game to get a look at Stieb, but quickly came away unimpressed with his swing. As they were packing up their things and preparing to head to the next town, something unexpected happened. With the starting pitcher on his last legs, Stieb suddenly came jogging in from the outfield to pitch, something he almost never did except in emergency situations. It took only a few pitches for the scouts to realize that his natural stuff was something special, and a few months later, the Jays selected Stieb in the fifth round of the MLB draft and set about convincing him to take up pitching full-time.

The rest, as they say, is history.

After his call-up to the big club in 1979, Stieb would become one of the elite aces in the game, a seven-time All-Star and the Jays franchise leader in just about every pitching category out there, including starts, innings pitched, wins, complete games, shutouts, strikeouts, and starter ERA. And yes, he has still thrown the only no hitter in franchise history, which he famously completed in 1990 after three times prior losing a no-no with two outs in ninth.

Yet, as great as Dave Stieb was, it is likely that he was even greater than we remember him. At least three times he was robbed of the Cy Young, in an era where the winner was often the pitcher with the most wins rather than the best pitcher, turning a man who should probably have multiple pieces of hardware into a guy with none.

Moreover, Stieb was wiped from the Hall of Fame ballot in his first year of eligibility after earning only 1.4% of the vote, despite having a higher career WAR than Hall of Fame pitchers like Jim Kaat, Bob Lemon, Catfish Hunter, and his contemporary, Jack Morris, while putting up a better ERA+ than Don Dysdale, Tom Glavine, and Steve Carlton.

With or without recognition, Dave Stieb was simply one of the most dominant pitchers of the 1980s, and, according to WAR, the best starting pitcher in Blue Jays franchise history.

Is Dave Stieb the best starting pitcher the Blue Jays have ever had, or does someone else top the list? Moreover, do the Jays have any up-and-comers who might one day join the conversation? Let me know in the comments or on the platform formerly known as Twitter – @WriteFieldDeep.