The Truth about Waiver Claims

Every year, usually in spring, fans get all excited about players their GM 'stole' from another team via a waiver claim.  To those people I have always preached that these players are most likely not even worth discussing and if they end up getting regular playing time it is not by design and fans should temper their enthusiasm.  

Well thanks to MLBtraderumors.com's transaction tracker we can now go back and look at the all the fabulous waiver claims made since 1990.  So to save you the trouble I've gone ahead and did a search on all Blue Jays waiver claims and listed the results below.  Now I'm not sure how complete this list is because I seem to remember other players such as Mike McCoy being acquired through a waiver claim, but I could be confusing it with a free agent signing.

To say the least, this list of players isn't all that inspiring and either verifies my belief that we shouldn't pay much attention to waiver claim players, or that Toronto has had a horrendous record with waiver claims.  I'm thinking it is the former because when I did searches for other teams, their lists weren't all the better.

Player Claimed	Team	General Manager	Date
Efrain Valdez	TOR	Pat Gillick	7/3/1991
Shawn Hillegas	TOR	Pat Gillick	4/3/1992
Roberto Duran	TOR	Gord Ash	3/14/1996
Ken Robinson	TOR	Gord Ash	5/7/1996
Omar Daal	TOR	Gord Ash	7/25/1997
Dane Johnson	TOR	Gord Ash	10/29/1997
Ben VanRyn	TOR	Gord Ash	5/29/1998
Jacob Brumfield	TOR	Gord Ash	5/7/1999
Willis Otanez	TOR	Gord Ash	5/28/1999
Curtis Goodwin	TOR	Gord Ash	8/6/1999
Pete Walker	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	5/3/2002
Jason Kershner	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	8/30/2002
Kevin Frederick	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	3/28/2003
Doug Davis	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	4/30/2003
Scott Service	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	6/16/2003
Sean Douglass	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	3/31/2004
Micheal Nakamura	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	4/9/2004
Steve Andrade	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	12/6/2004
Ray Olmedo	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	1/19/2007
Hector Luna	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	8/3/2007
Joe Inglett	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	9/15/2007
Mike Gosling	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	10/26/2007
Pedro Lopez	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	10/26/2007
Bill Murphy	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	3/17/2008
Dirk Hayhurst	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	10/6/2008
Bryan Bullington	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	10/24/2008
Kelvin Jimenez	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	11/3/2008
Angel Sanchez	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	11/3/2008
Les Walrond	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	11/4/2008
Brian Burres	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	2/4/2009
T.J. Beam	TOR	J.P. Ricciardi	2/5/2009
Sean Henn	TOR	Alex Anthopoulos	10/29/2009
Jarrett Hoffpauir	TOR	Alex Anthopoulos	11/3/2009
Brian Bocock	TOR	Alex Anthopoulos	1/7/2010
Casey Fien	TOR	Alex Anthopoulos	3/4/2010
Shawn Bowman	TOR	Alex Anthopoulos	4/14/2010
Taylor Buchholz	TOR	Alex Anthopoulos	9/9/2010