Throwback Thursday: Rocket Man Wins 4th Cy Young in First Season with Blue Jays

Roger Clemens' tenure with the Toronto Blue Jays was brief, but the impact he had on those late-90s teams was significant. The two years he pitched in Toronto were among the greatest individual seasons in club history.

Lured to Toronto by a three-year offer, and an option for a fourth, that paid him over $8 million per season—the highest average annual salary for a pitcher in baseball history at the time—Clemens didn't waste time winning over fans following his departure from the division-rival Red Sox.

The Rocket Man bounced back from some of his roughest years—although he fanned 257 the season before he came to Toronto and was 6.8 wins above replacement (per Fangraphs)—and injuries to deliver an otherworldly campaign that will forever be etched alongside the franchise's best. Clemens, who was firmly entrenched as one of the game's biggest stars after winning three Cy Young Awards during a sensational 13-year run in Boston, was electric from the onset. Making his presence felt immediately, Clemens threw a complete game with nine strikeouts in his first start with the Blue Jays and first major league game in something other than a Red Sox uniform. It was a sign of things to come. He had 14 double-digit strikeout games that season and would throw eight more complete games, three of which were shutouts.

There aren't enough superlatives to describe Clemens' utterly dominant first season in Toronto, which earned him, 18 years ago this week, his fourth Cy Young Award in a near-unanimous vote. Clemens placed first on 25 of 28 ballots to become the second consecutive Blue Jays pitcher to win the award after Pat Hentgen took home the honours in 1996.

Wins were still a big deal back then, and Clemens recorded his first 20-win season in seven years. Clemens, pitching in his age-34 season, started off the campaign by winning 11 consecutive decisions and didn't lose his first game until June 11.

He notched a league-best 21 wins, while also pacing the AL with a 2.05 ERA, 1.03 WHIP, 264 innings and 292 strikeouts. He posted a nearly unheard of 10.7 WAR. Only eight pitchers since 1900 have had 10-plus WAR seasons, according to Fangraphs. Clemens, Pedro Martinez (1999) and Randy Johnson (2001) are the only ones to do it post-1975.

He became the first pitcher in AL history to win the award four times, and first to win baseball's pitching Triple Crown—leading in wins, strikeouts and ERA—since the Tigers' Hal Newhouser in 1945. Clemens set Blue Jays single-season records that campaign in strikeouts and ERA.

The greatest pitcher of his era came north of the border at a time when baseball wasn't the same in Toronto anymore. The World Series days were long over. Attendance figures weren't dreadful, but they were far down from the glory days after the 1994 strike and some mediocre teams that followed the 1992-93 parades. But Clemens alone made trips to the SkyDome a worthy endeavour.

Clemens' 1998 encore was nearly as impressive, following up the greatest season of his career with another doozy to earn his second consecutive Cy Young Award, this one unanimously. Clemens placed first on all 28 ballots after posting a league-best 20 wins, 2.65 ERA and 271 strikeouts, marking the third straight season he led the AL in punchouts.

He set a Blue Jays single-game record that year by striking out 18 in a late August contest against the Royals. Despite logging under 500 career innings with the club, Clemens' 18.7 WAR with the Blue Jays is the eighth-best mark among pitchers in club history.

The power arm was the leading force behind Toronto's strong '98 season, but with the Yankees as the new gold-standard in the East and only one wild-card team making the playoffs at the time, the Blue Jays failed to make the postseason, falling four games back of Clemens' former Red Sox team. That subsequently closed the book on the Clemens-Blue Jays era, as the flamethrower didn't throw another pitch for the club.

Clemens, who reportedly wanted out, was moved to the Yankees ahead of the 1999 season for a package headlined by left-hander David Wells.

Clemens continued to excel with the Yankees and Astros before calling it a career after the 2007 season. He never threw another pitch in the majors after being named in the 2007 Mitchell Report for alleged performance-enhancing drug use. Clemens reportedly used while a member of the Blue Jays, and his All-Star 1997-98 campaigns haven't been remembered as fondly as a result. The allegations and ensuing denials by the star pitcher tarnished his reputation and has kept him out of baseball's Hall of Fame on his first three tries at induction. He's fallen way short each time of the required 75 percent of votes needed for enshrinement.

A first-round draft pick of the Red Sox in 1983, Clemens won the Cy Young Award a major league-best seven times. He ranks ninth on the all-time wins leaderboard and his 4,672 strikeouts trails only Johnson—who was runner-up to Clemens for the 1997 Cy Young Award—and Nolan Ryan.