The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame announced its 2024 induction class on Tuesday and a pair of former Toronto Blue Jays players, a former team president, and a current organizational coach are going in.
The ceremony will take place in St. Mary's, Ontario, Canada on June 15th and will include former Blue Jays pitcher Jimmy Key and former Blue Jays catcher Russell Martin. Furthermore, former team president Paul Godfrey is going in, as is current Jays' organizational coach Ashley Stephenson.
Martin, 40, is a Canada native who also got a chance to play for the Blue Jays from 2015-2018. Overall, he was a 14-year veteran who made four All-Star teams and won a Gold Glove. He played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, and Jays. He hit a career-high 23 homers in 2015 with Toronto and also stole 21 bases back in 2007. He helped the Blue Jays get to the ALCS in back-to-back years (2015-2016).
Key spent 15 years in the big leagues with the Blue Jays, Yankees and Orioles. He was a five-time All-Star who won two World Series titles. He won a title with Toronto in 1992 and with the Yankees in 1996. With Toronto, he led the majors in ERA (2.76) in 1987.
He won 116 games as a member of the Blue Jays from 1984-1992.
Stephenson is a legendary player on the Canadian Women's National Team and "Cooperstown in Canada" calls her the best player in national team history. She is currently a coach in the Jays' minor league system.
And finally, Godfrey is the former team President of the Blue Jays who was instrumental in getting baseball to the city.
"Born in Toronto in 1939, Paul Godfrey played a crucial role in bringing Major League Baseball to Toronto. As a young North York alderman in 1968, he watched Montreal land a big league franchise and wanted the same for his home city.
So, in 1969, the ambitious 30-year-old politician paid his own way to Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings at the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbor, Fla. He waited for commissioner Bowie Kuhn at the bottom of a set of stairs in the hotel and boldly approached the commissioner telling him he wanted to secure a big league team for Toronto. Kuhn told Godfrey that he would have to have a baseball stadium in Toronto before they would even consider it.
Armed with that feedback, Godfrey returned to Toronto with his sights set on creating a stadium. In 1973, Godfrey was elected chairman of Metropolitan Toronto, and on his first day in his new position, he promised he would land a big league team for the city and see that a dome stadium was built."
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