The best Blue Jays pitchers of all time, on a per-inning basis! |

Who is the best Blue Jays pitcher of all time? It’s a question that’s actually asked quite often by Jays fans, largely because there are two towering franchise figures with a strong claim to the title. A question that’s asked less often — probably because most Jays fans could guess the answer and don’t especially want to think about it — is: “Who is the best Blue Jays pitcher of all time, on a per-inning basis?”

Well, buckle up, because we’re about to think about it.

After having a lot of fun “remembering some guys” while looking back at the club’s best (and worst) position players on a per-game basis, I figured it would be a good idea to do the same on the pitching side while following the same pattern by not using any threshold for innings pitched. As a result, as was the case with those pieces, what we have here is not exactly a sensible list of the best pitchers in Jays history but an interesting mix of club legends and shooting stars, with some surprises in there for good measure. (If you’d like to see what a more “traditional” list might look like, check the supplemental reading section at the bottom.)

As with the earlier entries in this series, I will be using WAR/150 to compare players; taking the total amount of WAR (per FanGraphs) that every pitcher in Blue Jays history accumulated as a member of the club, dividing that by the number of innings they pitched for the Jays, then multiplying that number by 150. The last step is to make the per-game numbers just a little more digestible, as they’ll approximate modern full-season totals.

So let’s get to it! These are your greatest all-time Toronto Blue Jays pitchers on a per-inning basis.

11. Roy Halladay, 1998-2009, 3.6 WAR/150

I absolutely had to have this list go 11 names deep, because the greatest pitcher in Blue Jays history (or, if you prefer, the 1B to Dave Stieb’s 1A) landed just outside of our top 10. Placing even this high is a testament to the seasons that Halladay had from 2001 until 2009. Those, of course, were the years that followed his total reinvention as a pitcher, working with Mel Queen and using Harvey Dorfman’s book “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching” to devise a process that would go on to become a foundational block of the Halladay mystique.

His first 231 innings with the club, which represent more than 10 percent of his Blue Jays career, were anything but spectacular. Yes, there was the near no-hitter on the final day of the 1998 season, for which Bobby Higginson’s name still remains cursed in Toronto sports lore. But Halladay’s 1999 was just mediocre, with just 82 strikeouts in 149 1/3 innings, along with 79 walks and a 5.36 FIP. And 2000, of course, was a nightmare. He put up a horrific 10.64 ERA over 13 starts that year, and his infamous demotion all the way down to A-ball speaks to what an incredible struggle that season was for the one-time first-round pick.

All told, Halladay was worth just a half win over those first three partial big-league seasons, making it quite remarkable that he could end up on a list like this. He’s here, though. And every Blue Jays fan who remembers the brilliant career that followed knows exactly why.

(J. Meric / Getty Images)

10. Víctor Cruz, 1978, 3.8 WAR/150

One of the many Dominican players to pass through the Jays organization during the club’s early days, Cruz is probably best remembered as part of two notable trades in the late ’70s. He came to the club as a prospect from the St. Louis Cardinals organization in a December 1977 deal that sent future AL Cy Young winner (with Milwaukee) Pete Vukovich the other way. One year less a day later, the Jays would move him to Cleveland in a deal that brought back one of the club’s first stars, Alfredo Griffin.

In between those two deals, Cruz would put together such a strong rookie season for the Jays that the Toronto chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America would name him both the Jays’ Rookie of the Year and Pitcher of the Year for 1978. A midseason call-up with a twisting windup like Luis Tiant’s, Cruz began his MLB career with 21 1/3 scoreless innings over 13 appearances. Though he would end up walking a lot of batters — 35 in 47 1/3 innings — he allowed just 28 hits that year and finished with a 1.71 ERA and 1.2 WAR. Prorate that out over 150 innings and here he is on our list.

After that season, trusted Dominican scout Epy Guerrero urged the Blue Jays to pry Griffin, a slick-fielding shortstop, out of Cleveland. Cruz, it turned out, would be the agreed-upon price. After just two years in Ohio, he’d be a part of another franchise-shaping trade, heading to Pittsburgh as part of a deal for future Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven. Out of the big leagues after 1983, at the young age of 25, Cruz would play just two more minor-league seasons before exiting the sport for good. He passed away in 2004 at age 46.

9. Joaquin Benoit, 2016, 3.8 WAR/150

In early 2016, the Blue Jays’ beleaguered front office needed a win, and Drew Storen wasn’t it. Earlier that winter, Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins had traded popular outfielder Ben Revere for the former Nationals closer, hoping Storen’s awful end to the 2015 season had been a mere anomaly. Upon losing his job at the 2015 trade deadline when the Nats acquired Jonathan Papelbon, Storen imploded, allowing 16 runs (14 earned) over 15 appearances before breaking his thumb while slamming a locker in frustration, ending his season.

Things didn’t go much better for him with the Jays the next year. By late July, he’d logged just 33 1/3 innings, owing mostly to his ugly 6.21 ERA and sub-replacement-level WAR. With Storen badly in need of a change of scenery, the Jays managed to find a taker in the Seattle Mariners, flipping him for a similarly underperforming reliever in Benoit.

Storen turned his season around in Seattle, but in Toronto, Benoit was an absolute revelation. Over 23 2/3 innings with the Jays, he posted a microscopic 0.38 ERA, striking out 24, walking nine and allowing just a single home run. His WAR over that short span was 0.6. And with him solidifying the back of the bullpen, the Jays held off the Orioles, host the AL wild-card game, and made their way to the ALCS for a second consecutive year.

Benoit would miss the playoff run, though. When the Jays and Yankees benches cleared in an intense late-September game, Benoit joined his teammates in sprinting to the infield from the bullpen. As he lumbered across the Rogers Centre, he tore a calf muscle, ending his season and his brief but brilliant Blue Jays career.

8. Omar Daal, 1997, 3.9 WAR/150

One of a handful of players to suit up for the Blue Jays and the Expos in the same season, Daal had a rather excellent run for over two seasons beginning with his arrival in Toronto. Unfortunately for the Jays, the vast majority of those two seasons were spent elsewhere.

A deceptive, command-first lefty from Venezuela with a fastball that touched only the upper 80s, Daal had a brutal start to 1997 and was sporting a 9.79 ERA when he was placed on waivers by Montreal. The Jays picked him up, and over nine games, three of which were starts, he turned his season around. Over 27 innings, he produced 28 strikeouts, allowing just six walks and three home runs while pitching to a 4.00 ERA and a 3.15 FIP.

Do such numbers make him worthy of being so high on this list? Obviously, WAR says so — he was worth nearly a full win (0.7 WAR) in that short span. But even considering the era in which he compiled his statistics, they don’t seem especially elite.

Daal would get close to being an elite pitcher in the following years. Left unprotected by the Jays in the 1997 expansion draft, he was selected with the 31st pick by the Arizona Diamondbacks. In that club’s inaugural season of 1998, he pitched to a 2.88 ERA, producing 3.5 WAR. He followed it up with a 3.7 WAR season in 1999. By Baseball-Reference’s version of the metric, he was even better in those years, producing 4.2 and 4.6 WAR.

7. Ken Giles, 2018-2019, 3.9 WAR/150

Perhaps even more remarkable than the fact that Giles lands so high on this list is that he does so despite having a truly ugly start to his Blue Jays career. A vital part of the now-infamous 2017 Astros, Giles had struggled in the early months of 2018. He made waves when a clip of him punching himself in the face after surrendering an 11th-inning go-ahead home run to Gary Sánchez of the Yankees went viral. He was demoted to Triple A after swearing at manager A.J. Hinch when he was pulled from a game in early July. Though he’d been given a much-needed fresh start in Toronto, the early returns were not great. Giles allowed seven earned runs in his first 3 2/3 innings in Toronto, giving up eight hits, including three home runs, over four outings. Fortunately for the Jays and their fans, he settled in quickly after that.

Giles closed out August with a run of six saves and allowed just two more earned runs allowed over his final 17 appearances. He followed that up with an absolutely lights-out season in 2019 — despite battling elbow inflammation that sunk his trade value in the middle of the season, likely to the chagrin of the Jays’ front office — and struck out 83 batters in just 53 innings while pitching to a 1.87 ERA.

6. Joe Smith, 2017, 4.2 WAR/150

A right-hander with a sidearm delivery, Smith was a familiar face to Jays president Mark Shapiro and GM Ross Atkins when he signed a one-year deal for $3 million in February 2017. Smith had played for the pair for five seasons in Cleveland beginning in 2009. They would ultimately send him back there, but not before he authored a fantastic half-season for the Jays.

The veteran’s 2016 had been ugly, with just 40 strikeouts in 52 innings, a WAR total below replacement level, and a FIP of 4.99. In Toronto, however, he somehow morphed into a strikeout machine. In his four months with the club (one of which was spent on the injured list due to shoulder inflammation), he struck out 51 despite logging just 35 2/3 innings. By the end of the year, his 2.10 FIP ranked among the top 10 in baseball among pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched. During his Blue Jays tenure, he was worth one full win above replacement, making it one of the best pitching cameos in club history.

5. Anthony Kay, 2019, 4.3 WAR/150

To see the youngster’s name here is really quite shocking. A left-handed pitching prospect acquired from the Mets in July 2019 as part of the Marcus Stroman trade, Kay had the chance to get his feet wet in the big leagues at the end of last season. He made two starts, pitching in three games and logging just 14 innings.

Were they spectacular innings? Hardly. Kay allowed multiple earned runs in each of his outings, nine in total, walked five, allowed five hits and struck out just 13. His 5.79 ERA is thoroughly unimpressive. However, because Kay happened to not allow a single home run in any of his outings, FIP loved him. And because FanGraphs’ version of WAR uses FIP (with some adjustments), in his short big-league career, Kay has already produced 0.4 WAR.

FIP, which stands for Fielding Independent Pitching, is a surprisingly simple statistic. It’s also a powerful one, provided you don’t cut corners with it (which is precisely what we’re doing!). Here is how FanGraphs explains the formula:

The number is, in this case, quite obviously deceptive. That’s not to say that Kay isn’t still an exciting prospect, or that FIP is a bad stat. It’s just that there’s not enough data in Kay’s 14 big-league innings for it to produce any kind of meaning for us. As a minor-leaguer, he allowed 12 home runs in 133 2/3 innings in 2019. That’s actually pretty good. But he will give up some big-league home runs in his career, at which point his FIP won’t look nearly so tidy.

4. Tom Henke, 1985-1992, 4.3 WAR/150

A big, bespectacled right-hander nicknamed Terminator, Henke is one of the most genuinely underappreciated pitchers of his era. Sure, fans in Toronto will never forget the closer who was so instrumental to the Blue Jays’ run of success from 1985 until his departure to the Rangers via free agency following the 1992 World Series championship. But as he entered the final season of his career in 1995, Henke had only once been named to an All-Star team and had never won his league’s Rolaids Relief Man Award. (He would accomplish both feats that season, at age 37, in his lone year with St. Louis Cardinals.)

Looking back with 25 years of hindsight, it now seems downright criminal.

Over the course of his Blue Jays career — 1985 to 1992 — Henke ranks 50th among pitchers by WAR. All 49 players ahead of him pitched more than his 563 innings. Only three — Dennis Eckersley, Erik Hanson and Lee Smith — pitched fewer than 1,000 innings. None struck out more batters per nine innings. The great Nolan Ryan was the only other pitcher on the list with a K/9 above 10. By WAR per 150 innings over that span, Henke’s 4.3 mark ranks fourth among all pitchers in baseball.

Henke was an absolute beast, three times eclipsing 3.0 WAR despite pitching less than 95 innings in each of those seasons. Twice he led the majors in strikeouts per nine. Once in total strikeouts by a reliever. In combination with set-up man Duane Ward, Henke made late-inning situations a nightmare for Blue Jays opponents.

3. Roberto Osuna, 2015-2018, 4.4 WAR/150

Many Jays fans were understandably glad to see the back of him, after he spent the bulk the 2018 season serving a 75-game suspension for violating Major League Baseball’s Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse policy. But in better times, Osuna’s rapid rise was quite a story — and precisely the kind of break Alex Anthopoulos and his “stars and scrubs” version of team-building needed. One of five or six Anthopoulos needed, actually.

The Blue Jays entered 2015 much improved from the year before, with superstar third baseman Josh Donaldson having come over in a trade from the Oakland A’s. Catcher Russell Martin joined the club after signing a five-year, $82 million contract. Nonetheless, there were question marks all over the roster.

After Marcus Stroman was injured in spring training, the rotation was in desperate straits. Drew Hutchison started on Opening Day! Marco Estrada, who would be a revelation for the club from May onward, began the year in the bullpen. In the outfield, Dalton Pompey started on Opening Day in centre — a job he’d eventually lose to the surprisingly incredible glove of Kevin Pillar. Devon Travis, who had never played above Double A, started that day at second base. Chris Collabelo, an unheralded waiver pickup, started his season in Buffalo before going on to post a 143 wRC+ over 101 games in 2015. Justin Smoak didn’t even crack the Opening Day starting lineup, with manager John Gibbons opting for Edwin Encarnación at first base and backup catcher Dioner Navarro at DH.

And, of course, 20-year-old Miguel Castro began the season as the club’s closer, with Osuna joining him in the bullpen.

The roster could have been a train wreck. Instead, Estrada, Colabello, Travis, Pillar, Osuna and Ryan Goins blossomed unexpectedly, all at once. Osuna was saving games by June and — it must be said — doing a lock-down job of it. His 1.3 WAR that season was the lowest of the bunch, but he compiled it in fewer than 70 innings. He’d go on to have even better seasons than that and the steadiest career of anyone in the group. Though, on a different level, he’s the one who has ended up being the most disappointing.

2. David Price, 2015, 5.2 WAR/150

If it was the surprising success of guys such as Marco Estrada and Devon Travis that helped keep those magical 2015 Blue Jays afloat, it was the arrival of Price that shot them out of the pool and into the stratosphere.

The acquisition of Troy Tulowitzki just a few days before the July 31 trade deadline had signalled that the front office was “going for it,” despite the fact that the club was just 50-51 and sitting in fourth place in the American League East. It also sent a bolt of lightning through the fan base. But it hadn’t addressed the club’s biggest need: pitching. So when the Jays added Price on July 30, giving the team a legitimate ace, the mood truly turned to pure elation.

It didn’t take long for fans to understand how right they were to be excited. Tulowitzki’s first game was July 29. The team would lose just four times between then and August 26, compiling a 21-4 record over that span and reaching the top of the division.

They looked unstoppable, and Price delivered every fifth day. Over 11 starts, on his way to the AL ERA title and a second-place finish in the league’s Cy Young Award balloting, Price pitched 74 1/3 innings, struck out 87 batters and issued just 18 walks while posting an ERA of 2.30 and a 2.22 FIP. He also had a 9-1 record over that span.

More to our purposes, he produced 2.6 WAR in his brief Blue Jays career. Truly one of the most inspired, and most inspiring, runs of pitching dominance the franchise has ever seen.

(Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)

1. Roger Clemens, 1997-98, 5.7 WAR/150

You had to know this was where we were going. A two-time Cy Young Award winner who spent two years with the Blue Jays during one of the most profoundly weird eras in club history, Clemens tops our list. He also topped the list I mentioned several numbers back, of the pitchers with the best WAR/150 in baseball over the period from 1985 to 1992.

Yet, whether it’s because he requested a trade with two years left on his contract, the fact that he ended up with the hated Yankees, the later steroid allegations, or his alleged “relationship” with country singer Mindy McCready, whom he first met when she was just 15 years old, there’s simply isn’t much about Clemens, or his history in Toronto, that is fondly remembered.

The numbers are spectacular, of course. He piled up 563 strikeouts over 498 2/3 innings, a 2.33 ERA over 67 starts and just 20 home runs allowed. Absolutely beastly stuff. But he was a baseball mercenary on a team struggling under indifferent ownership and flailing in search of a new identity after the glow of the World Series successes had finally, unmistakably, worn off.

Still, it felt like such a coup when he arrived. His starts were events not to be missed. And in 1998, his final season in Toronto, the club managed to go 88-74. Unfortunately, that was the year they would be managed by Tim Johnson, meaning so much of the promise that the club showed would quickly unravel in a tangle of outlandish lies Johnson had told about serving in Vietnam.

Clemens would be central to that unraveling, not just because he would soon bolt for New York but also because he was a major part of the reason Johnson fibbed.

“Clemens’ brother was a Vietnam vet and owned a motorcycle helmet with the logo of his combat unit on it,” wrote Wright Thompson of the Kansas City Star, in a 2003 profile of Johnson, who by then had been exiled to the Mexican League.

“Knowing that Johnson’s wife had bought him a Harley for his birthday, Clemens set about trying to get a similar helmet made for his friend. So he started doing some checking. He didn’t have much luck. Then he called Johnson’s wife and asked her. According to friends in Clay Center (the Kansas city where Johnson made his home), she told Clemens that Timmy didn’t go to Vietnam.”

“Enemies,” strongly implied by Thompson to be then Jays pitching coach Mel Queen (with whom Johnson had publicly feuded), “found out, and the wheels came off.”

Johnson was still the manager when Clemens’ trade request was made. The Jays would stand by him all the way until the middle of spring training 1999, when the distraction became too much and the decision was made to let him go. A little more than a year later, Rogers Communications would strike an agreement with then-owners Interbrew to buy 80 percent of the team for $160 million. A new era of Blue Jays baseball would soon be in full swing.

Supplemental reading

If we change the threshold for innings pitched when we run these numbers, some of the weird extrapolations that bring guys like Kay and Daal into the mix are eliminated. Here’s what the list looks like when it includes only pitchers with at least 150 innings pitched for the Jays.

Best Blue Jays by WAR/150 (min. 150 IP)

Rank ▲	Name	IP	WAR	WAR/150
1	Roger Clemens	498.2	18.9	5.7
2	Roberto Osuna	223.0	6.5	4.4
3	Tom Henke	563.0	16.2	4.3
4	Roy Halladay	2,046.2	48.6	3.6
5	Duane Ward	650.1	14.8	3.4
6	David Cone	183.1	3.9	3.2
7	Dan Plesac	181.2	3.7	3.1
8	A.J. Burnett	522.2	10.2	2.9
9	Marcus Stroman	789.2	14.9	2.8
10	Juan Guzman	1,215.2	22.6	2.8

Better still (because Clemens falls just short of consideration, and Osuna is well off it also), here's what a list of the all-time greatest Jays pitchers on a per-inning basis looks like with a threshold of at least 500 innings pitched for the club.

Best Blue Jays by WAR/150 (min. 500 IP)

Rank	Name	IP	WAR	WAR/150
1	Tom Henke	563.0	16.2	4.3
2	Roy Halladay	2,046.2	48.6	3.6
3	Duane Ward	650.1	14.8	3.4
4	A.J. Burnett	522.2	10.2	2.9
5	Marcus Stroman	789.2	14.9	2.8
6	Juan Guzman	1,215.2	22.6	2.8
7	David Wells	1,148.2	19.1	2.5
8	Jimmy Key	1,695.2	28.1	2.5
9	Brandon Morrow	538.0	8.6	2.4
10	Kelvim Escobar	849.0	13.4	2.4

(Top photo: Sporting News via Getty Images)

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The best Blue Jays pitchers of all time, on a per-inning basis!