Duane Ward arrived in Toronto on Friday to celebrate the two World Series banners he helped hang there. By Sunday, the Blue Jays were mourning him.
The team confirmed Ward’s death, saying he passed away in Toronto of natural causes. He was 62. Ward had traveled to the city for a reunion honoring the 1992 and 1993 championship clubs but was absent from Saturday’s ceremony. The announcement came through Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith.
Ward’s baseball life is one of those deals that worked out for everybody — the kind of trade you don’t see anymore because front offices are too busy running regression models on bullpen usage rates. Atlanta took him ninth overall in the 1982 draft. Four years later, he was wearing a Braves uniform and getting shelled — 0-1, 7.31 ERA in 16 innings, optioned to Richmond before the calendar flipped to summer. On July 6, 1986, the Braves shipped him to Toronto for starter Doyle Alexander.
Then the dominoes started falling. Atlanta flipped Alexander to Detroit later that season. The return: a kid named John Smoltz, who went on to carve a plaque in Cooperstown. Meanwhile, Ward found something in a Blue Jays uniform that he never located in Atlanta. He became one of the hardest throwers in the American League, a late-inning hammer who eventually took the closer’s job from Tom Henke.
“I always joke about it because three or four months later the Detroit Tigers traded, straight-up, John Smoltz for Alexander,” Ward said, per John Kennedy’s account for the Society for American Baseball Research. “So, every time I run into John I say, ‘You know what, in a roundabout way, I was traded for you.'”
That roundabout turned into a dead-end for every American League hitter who dug in against Ward in the late innings. He led the league in saves and made the All-Star team in 1993, the same year the Blue Jays repeated as champions. He finished his career with 121 saves and a 3.28 ERA — numbers that don’t jump off a spreadsheet the way a 98-mph fastball jumps off a bat handle.
Ward stayed connected to the Blue Jays long after his playing days ended, regarded inside the organization as one of the most important relievers the franchise ever deployed. He was supposed to be in Toronto this weekend to stand with the teammates he won those two rings alongside. He made it to the city. He didn’t make it to the ceremony.
