The 9 greatest players in Toronto Blue Jays history
When the Blue Jays signed Roger Clemens to a four-year/$40 million deal ahead of the 1997 season, Toronto hoped that "The Rocket" would help them to return to the relevance that allowed them to win back-to-back World Series titles earlier in the decade.
That didn't happen, but it was far from Clemens' fault.
Between 1997 and 1998, Clemens went 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA, 2.44 FIP and a league-high 18.9 fWAR. Not only was Clemens an All-Star in both seasons, but he captured the American League Cy Young Award in each of his two seasons with the franchise.
Unfortunately for the Blue Jays, Clemens' dominance didn't translate to team success. The Blue Jays went just 76-86 in 1997, finishing dead last in the American League East. In 1998, they improved to 88-74, but that was still 26 games behind the New York Yankees, who won a staggering 114 games. It was four games back of the division-rival Boston Red Sox -- Clemens' former team -- as well, and in the era of just one Wild Card spot in each league, the Blue Jays were left out of the playoffs.

After rediscovering the dominance that he had shown in his first nine seasons in Boston -- probably with the assistance of performance-enhancing drugs -- Clemens demanded a trade. As Richard Justice reminds us in a story published at The Washington Post at the time, the Yankees edged out the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers to acquire Clemens before the 1999 campaign. He would spend the next five seasons in New York, marking his first of two stints with the Bronx Bombers. During those five seasons, the Yankees reached the World Series four times, winning it twice.
For the Blue Jays, you're left to wonder what could have been if they were able to build a contending team around Clemens, who remained one of the game's elite pitchers into his early-40s. If Clemens had simply just played out the four years on his initial contract in Toronto, he almost certainly would have cracked this list.
But even with how dominant he was, Clemens spent just two years with the Blue Jays. So, absent Clemens, here is a countdown of the nine greatest players in Blue Jays history: