Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson, Edwin Encarnacion. Every baseball fan knows their names.
Roberto Osuna, Russell Martin, Aaron Sanchez. Every Blue Jays fan knows their names.
And there are plenty more. People who’ve followed Toronto’s season are aware of Michael Saunders’s breakout offence in the early going; they know J.A. Happ won 20 games; they know Devon Travis is a hitting machine.
In fact, there are few baseball players on the Toronto Blue Jays roster who haven’t, at some point, been the talk of the town. But in the 162-plus-nine-game roller coaster that was the Jays’ season, the contributions of lesser-sung heroes can sometimes be forgotten. So let’s take a moment to remember them.
The 29-year-old Venezuelan is probably the most “sung” in this bunch, given the recency of his on-base prowess throughout the playoffs. Carrera hit .303/.343/.515 but more importantly, was crafty in the art of manufacturing clutch runs. To wit: In the wild-card game against Baltimore, Carrera evened the score to 2–2 with a one-out line-drive single to centre field that drove Saunders home. In Game 3 of the ALDS against the Texas Rangers, Carrera was once again part of the play that evened the score, being the batter at the plate when a passed ball allowed Troy Tulowitzki to run home.
And then there were those two triples, in Games 3 and 4 of the ALCS, the first of which came in the lead-off at bat of the fifth inning after which Carrera capitalized on a Ryan Goins groundout to—you guessed it—even the score at 2–2. Carrera wound up scoring the Jays’ fifth run on his second triple in the do-or-die Game 4, giving Toronto fans a nice four-run buffer against Cleveland in the bottom of the eighth (and, oh by, the way, “Zeke” also drove in the Jays’ second run of the game in the fourth, once again pushing Tulowitzki to the plate on a single to centre).
The Jays’ utility man stepped in as shortstop in late May when Tulowitzki went on the disabled list with a strained quadriceps and promptly went on a tear, notching six multi-hit games in 15 and hitting .321, while helping the Jays win critical series against the Red Sox, Yankees, and Orioles. Barney’s offensive production eventually levelled off, though he finished the season with a respectable .269/.322/.373 line. But perhaps his biggest achievement was as the losing pitcher in the 19-inning Canada game against Cleveland, in which Barney had three hits, including a double, and then stepped to the mound after Gibbons had exhausted the ‘pen (as well as Goins) to give up a home run to Carlos Santana, but also to strike out the formidable Mike Napoli.
The left-handed vet joined the Jays in August to some trepidation among fans. Despite winning records with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2013 and 2015, the first half of 2016 had been rather dismal, and Liriano was lugging a 5.46 ERA with him across the border. But Jays GM Ross Atkins insisted that Liriano could be a weapon, and no outing proved him right more than the one on Sept. 23 against the Yankees, when Liriano pitched 6 shutout innings to help the Jays take a 9–0 win to start the series—one of just two series that they won in September—and shake off the sweep Toronto suffered in the Bronx earlier in the month. Fans breathed a huge sigh of relief, and Liriano’s teammates watched in awe. “I probably told him ‘Wow” about five times when he was done,” said Devon Travis.
It would be unfortunate if the moment for which fans best remembered this 39-year-old reliever (the other 39-year-old reliever in the Jays’ ‘pen) was of him limping off the field after a bench-clearing brawl in late September with a torn calf, an injury which ended Benoit’s season. The injury also cost the Jays a key piece in their bullpen. After Benoit joined the team in July, he pitched in 24 games, only ever allowing a single run—a home run, in fact, to David Ortiz, on Sept. 11. Benoit struck out his 1,000th batter a few days earlier against the Tampa Bay Rays, in the Jays’ lone win of the series. That milestone was notched against Rays slugger Evan Longoria, and Benoit actually struck out the side in that seventh inning, extending his scoreless streak to 16.1, 15.1 of which were with the Jays.
Dickey makes this list because, while he is a well-known entity both in Toronto and throughout the baseball world, his role in helping the Jays make the post-season this year runs the risk of being not just overlooked but possibly maligned. Fans often groaned when Dickey’s turn to start came around. And yes, he had some bad patches, losing six in a row in April and May; regularly giving up six runs in as few as three innings.
But let’s not forget Dickey’s last start of the season (and probably last as a Blue Jay) on Sept. 16, when he threw five shutout innings against the Los Angeles Angels, the second win for the Jays in a 2-2 series draw in Anaheim. And given that this was likely Dickey’s swan song with the team, it’s fitting here to reflect briefly on his overall resumé in Toronto, where the 42-year-old knuckleballer delivered four consecutive seasons of double-digit wins.
