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USA TODAY Sports

For the Toronto Blue Jays, it was another season that began with promise and ended in disappointment. The Jays finished 83-79, third in the American League East and well back in the wild-card standings.

Sigh.

As a way for long-suffering Toronto Blue Jays fans to move on and recover from another lost season, let's take a look back through Jays history and rank the top five Blue Jays of all time. It'll be good for the soul.

Before we dive in, a few words on the criteria.

If we're talking about the "top Blue Jays," then three criteria are necessary to guide the rankings.

Top

"Top" will be taken literally. In order to be considered for this list, a player must have been the winner of a major trophy, which recognizes that player as a "top" player.

Appointment to the Hall of Fame (Roberto Alomar, spoiler alert!) as well as an MVP award (George Bell), a Cy Young (Roger Clemens), a Rookie of the Year award (Eric Hinske), the Hank Aaron Award (Jose Bautista and Carlos Delgado) or a Silver Slugger award (Vernon Wells, Dave Winfield, Jesse Barfield, Joe Carter, Kelly Gruber and Fred McGriff, among others) will suffice.

The Sporting News "Pitcher of the Year" award will count too, in order to give pitchers some balance with the Silver Slugger recipients. Pat Hentgen, Dave Stieb and Roy Halladay come into play here.

Blue Jays

In order to be considered for this list, the player must have enjoyed their best seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Though former Jays like Paul Molitor and Roger Clemens were all-time great players, Molitor was a lifetime Brewer and Clemens (despite the Cy Young awards in Toronto) is remembered more for his days as a member of the Red Sox.

Sorry, guys, you won't make this list.

WAR

In the age of sabermetrics, this top-five list will also take wins above replacement (WAR) into consideration.

So, here are the top players who played their best baseball with the Blue Jays and produced notable WAR values.

Let's march on with the countdown...