The greatest Canadian MLB players of all time, according to WAR/150 -

Canada Day is upon us, and hoo boy, it’s a bit of a strange one, isn’t it? I can understand why a lot of people might not be in much of a celebratory mood in this country right now, what with a pandemic, a long-overdue public reckoning with police racism and militarization, debates about removing statues and renaming places honouring ghoulish historical figures, horrifying stories from the junior hockey world, increasing economic inequality, political indifference to the looming threat of climate change and growing recognition of the grave injustices faced by our indigenous communities and systemic racism all around us.

The Canada of our myths and our Tim Hortons commercials doesn’t match up with the reality far too often and for far too many of us.

It’s my job to write about fun baseball stuff, and with the holiday this week, it’s only natural to have a piece with a red-and-white twist, but I think it’s important to acknowledge and think about all of that. If anyone isn’t feeling very much like flag waving right now, I completely get it.

That said, he awkwardly segued, this country has produced some incredible ballplayers over the years, and July 1 offers us a great opportunity to look at them all as a group. And let’s face it: A look at the best Canadian big leaguers of all time just won’t resonate the same way in mid-January as it will at this time of the year, regardless of whether the mood of the country is festive or full of entirely righteous anger. So today we’re going to put a Canadian spin on a Jays-themed project I produced early on during MLB’s shutdown: a look at the country’s greatest players of all time by WAR/150.

In other words: WAR on a 150-game basis for position players and a 150-inning basis for pitchers, numbers that approximate a modern full-season workload.

Admittedly, it’s an imperfect stat to use for an exercise such as this. But what isn’t?

Yes, by averaging out a player’s WAR, guys who spent many years in the big leagues tend to get penalized, especially those who had great peaks but long fades at the end of their careers. And relievers and the injury-prone tend to get elevated because of the way their careers often quickly end. But that just means we get a somewhat different list, some different characters and a different way of looking at things than we would by simply looking at a career WAR leaderboard. And that’s really what’s important when doing a piece like this.

(Note: All WAR figures via Baseball-Reference.)

The 10 greatest Canadian position players of all time (minimum 100 games)

Just missed: Jason Bay (2.9 WAR/150), Terry Puhl (2.8), Justin Morneau (2.6)

10. Pete Ward | IF/OF | 1962-70 | Montreal, Que. | 3.1 WAR/150

The son of Jimmy Ward of Fort William, ON, a Stanley Cup winner in 1935 with the Montreal Maroons, Pete Ward was the runner-up for the 1963 AL rookie of the year award as a third baseman for the Chicago White Sox. He followed it up with a six-win season that saw him finish sixth in AL MVP voting, losing to Brooks Robinson but finishing ahead of greats like Harmon Killebrew and Al Kaline and producing more WAR than Elston Howard and Mickey Mantle.

Though his batting average would begin to fall off later in his career, contributing to his big-league career ending in 1970 at age 32, through the modern lens, his body of work looks quite a bit better. He finished with a 115 OPS+ for his career on a .254/.339/.405 line and was only a below-league-average hitter in one of eight full seasons.

9. Goody Rosen | CF | 1937-46| Toronto, ON | 3.2 WAR/150

Rosen has a much bigger story than we have space for here, but you can read up on his career in an outstanding SABR piece by Alex Tepperman, who calls “the cigar-smoking, Yiddish-speaking travelling garment salesman from the Toronto Annex one of the most beloved Canadian baseball players of his time.” (Kevin Plummer of Torontoist also has a great piece on him from 2013.)

Rosen played just 551 games in the big leagues, spending the majority of his career in the minors, including a swan song with his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs in 1947. Amazingly, that season was just two years removed from his professional peak. At age 32 in 1935, as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was great at the plate, slashing .325/.379/.460 over 145 games, scoring 126 runs and picking up 197 hits. He was also a strong defensive outfielder, which helped lead him to a 10th-place finish in NL MVP voting and a 5.5 WAR on the season. He was better that year than Lou Boudreau, Hank Greenberg and Mel Ott.

8. Russell Martin | C | 2006-present? | East York, ON | 3.4 WAR/150

I put a question mark after “present” because Martin hasn’t retired, but he also remains unsigned. If this is the end, it was an incredible run. Jays fans will need no introduction to the club’s greatest-ever Canadian player, arguably its best free-agent signing of all time, and the catcher whose arrival in late 2014 signaled the beginning of a new era of Blue Jays baseball — the club’s most successful in more than 20 years.

7. Tip O’Neill | LF | 1883-92 | Springfield, ON | 3.6 WAR/150

There is a reason that the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame’s annual award for the best Canadian ballplayer is named in O’Neill’s honour. The guy could flat out hit. As a member of the St. Louis Browns of the American Association, he won the triple crown in 1887, slashing .435/.490/.691 with 14 home runs and 123 RBIs. His 213 OPS+ that season is in the top 25 all-time, a list dominated by Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams, who hold 16 of the spots ahead of him.

“The Woodstock Wonder” was not just a one-year wonder, either. His career OPS+ of 144 ranks in the top 50 all-time. Nor was he simply an individual star. O’Neill’s Browns won the American Association pennant four years in a row, from 1885 to 1888, and won the World Series (then an exhibition series) by beating the NL champion Chicago White Stockings in 1886.

6. Corey Koskie | 3B | 1998-2006 | Anola, MB | 3.7 WAR/150

Here’s a name that might surprise Blue Jays fans. Toronto saw Koskie at his worst and most disappointing. The club’s big free agent signing in the winter after the 2004 season, Koskie struggled through an injury-plagued 2005 campaign with the Jays. He slashed just .249/.337/.398 with 11 home runs, 14 fewer than he’d hit for the Twins the year before.

His Toronto career ended ignominiously with him being shipped to Milwaukee after just one year of a three-year contract. Things went from bad to worse for him the following year when he suffered a concussion on an innocuous-looking dive for a ball behind third base.

He tried to come back, but the concussion ended his career. It’s because of that and his exit from the Jays, I think, that we tend to forget just how good he was in his years with the Twins. Koskie sported a 116 career OPS+ when he arrived in Toronto and received an MVP vote in 2001, finishing sixth in WAR among AL players that year with a mark of 6.3 — ahead of Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, Manny Ramírez and Edgar Martinez. He was also an important defensive player on Twins teams that went to the playoffs in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

The abrupt end to his career helps him land so high on this list, but he’s definitely a guy worth remembering.

5. Brett Lawrie | 3B | 2011-16 | Langley, B.C. | 4.0 WAR/150

Lawrie might not have fulfilled his promise with the Blue Jays — though his trade to Oakland, which brought Josh Donaldson to the Jays, still makes him one of the more important figures in recent club history — but when he was healthy, he was at times a very good ballplayer. Better, I think, than a lot of us might remember.

But probably not this good.

According to Baseball-Reference, he produced 15.6 WAR over the course of his 588-game career. Injuries and the abrupt end to his time in the big leagues have certainly played a role in his landing so high up on this list, but so has the way that the defensive metric DRS is calculated. Lawrie’s +20 DRS in 2012 is a hugely different number than the one given to him by the other main advanced defensive metric of the time, UZR. He was a half-run above average by UZR and 20 above by DRS.

Colin Wyers, then of Baseball Prospectus and now a member of the Braves’ front office, figured out in 2012 that Lawrie was getting outsized credit for making routine plays when shifted into short right field. Honestly, I thought this had been factored into his WAR calculation since then, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case, as his 98 OPS+ season in 2012 registers at a rather robust 4.5 WAR.

An interesting guy and a career that ended too soon, but better than Koskie? Not for my money.

4. Jeff Heath | LF | 1936-49 | Fort William, Ont. | 4.1 WAR/150

A guy who undoubtedly benefitted from playing during the war years (not to mention baseball’s pre-integration era), Heath nonetheless has some very impressive career numbers — .293/.370/.509 and a 139 OPS+ in a 14-year career — and could have produced even more if not for an ankle injury suffered at the end of the 1948 season that effectively ended his career.

Heath helped lead the Boston Braves to the NL pennant that season, blasting 20 home runs in 115 games and posting a 165 OPS+ on a .319/.404/.582 line. But just four games from the end of the season, according to a SABR bio by C. Paul Rogers III, and headed to his first World Series after more than 1,300 big-league games, he “suffered a gruesome injury when he broke his ankle sliding into home plate” at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, N.Y.

That brought to an end a 4.7 WAR season — the second-best of a career that saw him accumulate an impressive 37.6 WAR, make two All-Star teams, and receive MVP votes five times.

3. George Selkirk | OF| 1934-42 | Huntsville, ON | 4.1 WAR/150

The man who replaced Babe Ruth after the legendary slugger left the Yankees following the 1934 season, Selkirk also took Ruth’s No. 3 uniform. A two-time All-Star, he was a key player on five World Series-winning teams in the post-Ruth era of Lou Gehrig and a young Joe DiMaggio. His best year came in 1939, when he failed to get MVP votes but finished with 5.8 WAR — more than Hall of Famers Bill Dickey, Hank Greenberg and Charlie Gehringer.

As we’ve established, injuries and abrupt ends to careers tend to push players up this list, and Selkirk ticks both boxes. He managed to get into just 846 games over his nine-year big-league career and never returned to the majors after enlisting in the U.S. Navy in 1942. Though his skills had been fading by then anyway, his career slash line of .290/.400/.483 and 127 OPS+ are excellent marks. He would go on to work as an executive for many years, including a nine-year run as general manager of the expansion Washington Senators (now the Texas Rangers) from 1962 until 1971.

2. Joey Votto | 1B | 2007-present | Toronto, ON | 5.4 WAR/150

Well, now, this feels right, doesn’t it? Votto will turn 37 in September, meaning the clock is winding down on his storied career, but he’s been the picture of excellence since entering the league in 2007. The 2010 NL MVP, Votto is a six-time All-Star and has led the majors in on-base percentage three times and the NL alone on four other occasions. His career slash line stands at an incredible .307/.421/.519, which works out to a 150 OPS+.

That .421 on-base percentage makes him the active leader in the big leagues and ranks 17th all time — placing him right between Mickey Mantle and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

An absolute legend.

1. Larry Walker | OF | 1989-2005 | Maple Ridge, B.C. | 5.5 WAR/150

So this has worked out quite well, hasn’t it? The man who belongs at the top of the list has ended up at the top of the list. Though Walker hasn’t officially been inducted into the Hall of Fame and won’t get a chance to be feted in Cooperstown this summer, he’s an all-time great through and through.

I wrote about his incredible career and what he meant to Canadians back in January after he finally received that well-deserved call.

The 10 greatest Canadian pitchers of all time (minimum 200 innings)

Just missed: Erik Bedard (2.0 WAR/150)

10. Paul Quantrill | RHP | 1992-2005 | London, ON | 2.2 WAR/150

Born in London, ON, but better known for residing in Port Hope, Quantrill adds some great Blue Jays content to this list right off the top. Quantrill posted an ERA+ above 140 eight times in his 14-year big-league career and led the AL in relief appearances twice (2001 and 2004) and the majors two times in addition to that (2002 and 2003).

That 2003 season, spent with the Los Angeles Dodgers, saw him enter a game a remarkable 89 times — landing him in the top 10 all-time for a single season — and pitch to a ridiculous 1.75 ERA. He represented the Jays at the 2001 All-Star Game in Seattle, and over seven full seasons from 1997 to 2003 he pitched to an incredible 2.81 ERA.

That 2.81 mark ranks fifth among pitchers with at least 500 innings over that span, ahead of the likes of Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Curt Schilling, Tom Glavine, and Roger Clemens. (Granted, they were all starters and pitched a lot more innings, but still!)

9. Eric Gagne | RHP | 1999-2008 | Montreal, QC | 2.7 WAR/150

A Cy Young winner, a three-time All-Star, a World Series champ with the Red Sox, the architect of an incredible big-league record streak of 84 consecutive converted save chances and, well, you know the rest.

Gagne was an absolutely dominant closer for three years from 2002 until 2004. Then injuries hit, the Mitchell Report hit and things were never the same. Still, he had a remarkable career, which has been somewhat unfairly tainted in the minds of a lot of people because of our simplistic view of the PED era, which tended to overlook how deep the problem was by placing blame only on a few bad apples.

8. James Paxton | LHP | 2013-present | Ladner, B.C. | 2.7 WAR/150

Someone who certainly benefits from our WAR/150 calculation because he’s found it difficult to stay healthy but has generally been good when on the field — including pitching a no-hitter against the Blue Jays at Rogers Centre in May 2018 — “The Big Maple” is in the middle of putting together a fine career. Currently with the Yankees and now recovered from back surgery he underwent in February, Paxton will be a free agent this winter, and there are few players whose financial fortunes will hinge more on the upcoming 60-game season than his.

7. Ferguson Jenkins | RHP | 1965-83 | Chatham, ON | 2.7 WAR/150

And here we have the guy who should, by all rights, be at the top of every list of the greatest Canadian pitchers of all time — at least until someone else joins him in the Hall of Fame.

Jenkins is a Canadian baseball legend, having won the 1971 NL Cy Young Award while with the Cubs, winning 284 games over a 19-year big-league career, producing seven 20-win seasons, making three All-Star teams, striking out 3,192 batters and averaging a staggering 243 innings per season over the course of his career. In ’71 he led the National League with a mind-bending 325 innings pitched. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1991.

6. Rich Harden | RHP | 2003-11 | Victoria, B.C. | 2.9 WAR/150

Harden had a very good run, playing for some good A’s teams in the early 2000s before injuries — which had troubled him throughout his career — got the better of him. He threw his last big-league game for the A’s at age 29 in 2011. He’s still only 38 years old.

In other words, this is yet another case of a guy who was good when he was healthy but simply wasn’t healthy enough. This was especially true for Harden in 2008, when he finished 10th in WAR among MLB pitchers with a mark of 5.9, even though he pitched just 148 innings over 25 starts — a far cry from Jenkins’ workload from 25 years earlier.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Harden’s 2008 season now, of course, is that he was traded from the A’s to the Cubs in the middle of the year. Josh Donaldson is one of the players who ended up going the other way.

5. Jesse Crain | RHP | 2004-13 | Toronto, ON | 3.2 WAR/150

Born in Toronto and thus able to suit up for Team Canada in international competition, most of Crain’s early baseball development took place in the United States. He went to high school in Boulder, Colo., then moved on to the University of Houston before becoming a second-round draft pick of the Twins in 2002. But we’ll take him!

Crain might have just been a middle reliever, but he was an excellent one for a surprisingly long time. His career ERA of 3.05 is a pretty impressive mark, but he seemed to get better with age: From 2010 to 2013, over 227 appearances, he pitched to a 2.39 ERA while striking out 238 batters in 218 innings.

The 2013 season was shaping up to be Crain’s best yet. In his third season with the White Sox, he had moved into a setup role and pitched 31 consecutive scoreless innings from April until late June. That streak was broken on June 29, when he took a loss to Cleveland. A bout of recurring shoulder pain flared up the next time he tried to get into a game. He landed on the injured list, missed the All-Star Game (which he had been selected for, despite the injury) and would never pitch in the majors again.

4. Russ Ford | RHP | 1909-15 | Brandon, MB | 3.3 WAR/150

Ford was a pioneer in many ways. The first Manitoban to play in the majors, he also discovered that one could use an emery board to make their pitches dip and dive unexpectedly — something he unearthed while playing for the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association in 1908, according to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. That made him the first of “a long line of scuff ball artists,” explained T. Kent Morgan and David Jones in a SABR bio, “including contemporaries Cy Falkenberg and Eddie Cicotte and Hall of Famers White Ford and Don Sutton.”

“He kept his secret a long time by pretending he was pitching a spitter,” Ty Cobb would later say, per Morgan and Jones. “He would deliberately show his finger to the batter and then wet it with saliva.”

What a world!

Ford was spectacular when he broke into the big leagues with the Yankees in 1910, pitching 299 1/3 innings to the tune of a 1.65 ERA while winning 25 games and striking out 209, making him only the third big-league pitcher to win 20 games while striking out 200. His arm, however, didn’t hold up for very long. After managing just 34 punchouts over 127 1/3 innings with the Buffalo Buffeds of the Federal League in 1915, he left the majors for good.

Still, given the low pitching standards at the time, Ford and his emery board stood well above most of his peers, accumulating 32.7 WAR over just six full seasons.

3. John Hiller | LHP | 1965-80 | Toronto, ON | 3.7 WAR/150

Hiller’s story is an absolutely incredible one, and getting to share it for those who might not have heard it before is precisely why I prefer to make lists like this somewhat unconventional. A Scarborough, ON kid who was discovered by a Tigers scout as a teen in 1962, Hiller gave up his $10-a-week job bagging groceries and took a $400-a-month offer to try his hand at baseball. He worked his way to the majors as a lefty swingman and pitched to a 2.39 ERA over 128 innings as a member of the 1968 world champion Detroit Tigers.

In January 1971, a little over two years after his Tigers had triumphed in the 1968 World Series, Hiller suffered a heart attack at age 27.

According to a May 1973 report in the Ottawa Citizen, doctors in ’71 discovered cholesterol blockages in both of his coronary arteries. Hiller ended up having the 7-foot-long portion of his small intestines that was responsible for the absorption of cholesterol removed.

He missed the entire 1971 season. But he also ended up in much better shape because of the ordeal, losing 50 pounds by the time the Tigers extended an invite to him to their 1972 spring camp as a minor-league coach. He spent half a season with the Lakeland Tigers, then announced his intention to pitch in the majors again — and did exactly that, joining Detroit in time to make 23 appearances down the stretch as the team won the American League pennant.

Hiller’s ERA in that partial comeback season was an incredible 2.03, yet the story gets even more improbable from there. In 1973, Hiller had one of the greatest seasons a relief pitcher has ever had. In 125 1/3 innings, he struck out 124, walked just 39, allowed only 89 hits, saved 38 games and allowed just 20 earned runs (and 21 runs overall). His ERA was 1.44. If we look at FanGraphs’ ERA- stat, Hiller’s mark of 36 tied for the fifth-best all-time among pitchers with at least 100 innings, just behind Pedro Martínez in 2000 (35) and ahead of Greg Maddux in 1997 (37). His ERA+ was calculated to a staggering 283.

Hiller wasn’t done, either. He followed his comeback player of the year campaign in 1973 with an All-Star appearance and a seventh-place finish in AL Cy Young balloting in 1974 and continued pitching into 1980, at age 37.

If he had hung it up after 1978, his last good season, his career ERA would stand at 2.62. His final two years bumped it up a little, however — all the way to a “mere” 2.82. With 31 WAR in just 1,242 career big-league innings and one of the most astounding comebacks in the history of sports, he has a well-deserved place near the top of this list, among the greatest Canadian pitchers the sport has ever seen.

2. Mike Soroka | RHP | 2018-present | Calgary, AB | 4.1 WAR/150

Soroka is a young and incredibly talented pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, having already — at just 22 — taken the mantle from Paxton as the best Canadian pitcher currently in the game. He only barely qualified for this list, with just 1/3 of an inning beyond our 200-inning threshold, but that is not to say he isn’t deserving. Last year’s runner-up for the NL Rookie of the Year Award already has a top-six Cy Young finish under his belt and is only getting started. The eyes of the country will most certainly be on him the next time the World Baseball Classic rolls around.

1. Jeff Zimmerman | RHP | 1999-2001 | Kelowna, B.C. | 4.9 WAR/150

Zimmerman is a bit of a surprise at the top of our list, but there is no doubt that two of his three big-league seasons with the Texas Rangers were absolutely spectacular. That’s especially true when you look at his WAR totals — and especially true if they’re the ones given by Baseball-Reference. Zimmerman wouldn’t be nearly as high on this list if we were using the FIP-based FanGraphs version of WAR, which says he was worth just 3.4 wins over 228 2/3 innings of work. The formula at Baseball-Reference, however, works with the actual runs a pitcher allowed and puts his WAR total at 7.5.

Whichever metric you prefer, it’s still an incredible amount of production for anyone — let alone a guy who began his career with the Montpellier Barracudas of the French Elite League. Zimmerman didn’t play North American pro ball until he was 24 years old, spending a year with the Winnipeg Goldeyes in 1997.

Like so many of these pitchers, though, Zimmerman’s success was short-lived. It was a feel-good story when the Rangers signed him to a three-year, $10 million contract heading into the 2002 season. Unfortunately, the shine came off the deal almost immediately. Tendinitis in Zimmerman’s right elbow led him to shut it down that spring of 2002, forcing the Rangers to go with the newly acquired John Rocker as their closer). Tommy John surgery eventually followed, and even more injuries after that. Ultimately Zimmerman would have a second Tommy John procedure before temporarily hanging it up in 2006, having last pitched in the majors in 2001.

“I think José Rijo had three — I don’t want to tie his record,” Zimmerman told T.R. Sullivan of ESPN in 2009.

By that time, it had been more than five years since Zimmerman had thrown a competitive inning at any level, yet he was trying to make a comeback after allowing his arm time to heal naturally. Sadly, it wouldn’t work out. He got into three games for the Mariners’ Arizona League affiliate in June of that year, but the comeback would go no further. Our greatest Canadian pitcher of all time by WAR/150 lasted just three years.

(Photo of Joey Votto: Rob Tringali / Getty Images)

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