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.

2. Roy Halladay (48.4 WAR)

For Blue Jays fans, Roy Halladay’s story is well known – from the near no-hitter in his second career start in 1998, to his collapse in 2000 that saw him sent all the way down to A-ball to rebuild his delivery, to his triumphant return and emergence as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Yet, some may not quite fully understand just how good ‘Doc’ was during his heyday with the Jays.

In the eight years Halladay pitched for the team after his reemergence from the minors, he was not only a six-time All Star, seven-time Opening Day starter, and the 2003 Cy Young winner, but he finished in the top five of Cy Young voting five different times. Even more incredible, these five times do not include Halladay’s 2002 season, in which he put up a 2.93 ERA and led the league in pitcher WAR but did not receive so much as one Cy Young vote, or 2005, when Halladay was in the midst of his best season ever (2.41 ERA over 19 starts) before his leg was broken by a Kevin Mench line drive.

More than that, as baseball moved rapidly towards shorter starts and higher bullpen usage, Halladay put up 49 complete games with the Jays, leading the league five times. He was not just another top pitcher, but perhaps the game’s last great workhorse. Seriously, the 49 complete games Halladay put up with the Jays are more than every single Blue Jays pitcher combined has managed in the 14 years since he left (35), while his 67 career complete games are more than Verlander, Kershaw, and Scherzer put together (63). Further, the seven times Halladay led the league in complete games over his career is the most of any pitcher since World War II.

The only regret with Halladay’s Blue Jays tenure is that the team was never good enough to let Doc work his magic in the playoffs, a fact which hit even harder when he was traded to the Phillies and threw a no-hitter in his first career playoff start.

Still though, Jays fan can take solace in the fact that for nearly a decade, they got to watch one of the best to ever do it go to work every fifth day.