A Canada Day Salute to Matt Stairs, First-Ballot Immaculate Grid Hall of Famer

In a 20-year MLB career, Canadian baseball star Matt Stairs played for 12 organizations and made a lasting impression worth saluting on Canada Day - and every day.

Journeyman is one of those labels in sports like game manager or system player that whether intentional or not feels like derogatory. Thirty-three years after his Major League Baseball debut, however, Matt Stairs’ status as a career journeyman separates him as one of the most memorable players of an era. On this Canada Day, Press Break is pleased to salute a Northern baseball icon and first-ballot honoree in the Immaculate Grid Hall of Fame.

Matt Stairs played at least part of 19 seasons from 1992 through 2011, debuting with the Montreal Expos. A native Canadian, beginning in his homeland is a neat starting point for a career that traversed North America and crossed the Pacific. Stairs is one of only four Canadian-born Big Leaguers to have played for both the Expos and Canada’s enduring MLB team, the Toronto Blue Jays.

Montreal and Toronto are two of the 12 franchises Matt Stairs represented in his two-decade career — 13 franchises, if you count the Expos and Washington Nationals as separate entities. The label journeyman applies no more fittingly to any modern player than Stairs, and as such, he is as prominent of a baseball name as any Hall of Famer in my own tiny pocket of the world.

See, I am part of a group chat that shares our daily Immaculate Grid results with each other. Matt Stairs has gained a downright heroic place in our circle, with any opportunity to guess him on the trivia game being commemorated as a Stairs Day.

Canada Day may come only once a year, but Stairs Day can be celebrated weekly — at minimum. Having played for 40 percent of all MLB franchises, Stairs is a viable for many an Immaculate Grid square.

To illustrate Stairs’ impact on the Grid, I selected a recent date at random — June 15, 2025 — and immediately there are two Stairs Squares; almost three, as he hit 265 home runs in his career.

Although he began his career in Canada with Montreal, he didn’t hit the first of his 265 homers with the club. Likewise, Stairs was not a member of the Uncrowned World Series Champion Expos in 1994.

After appearing in only six games with Montreal through May and June 1993, he landed with the Chunichi Dragons of Nippon Professional Baseball. A move across the Pacific early in Stairs’ career was a fitting harbinger of the years and mileage accrued that followed, beginning in 1995 when he returned to MLB with his second club overall the Boston Red Sox.

Boston marked Stairs’ initial foray into the American League, with half of the 12 franchises he played for representing AL. The 1995 season also kicked off his longest stint in either of the two leagues, lasting through the 2000 campaign.

Stairs rounded into form as a Major League hitter through this stretch, too. He joined the Oakland A’s in 1996 and spent four seasons in the Bay, hitting 10 home runs his first year with the Athletics; 27 in 1997; 26 in 1998; and 38 in 1999.

For some Canada Day flavor, check out this Sportsline Toronto feature on the Saint John, New Brunswick¹, native Stairs during his time with the A’s.

It was after his five seasons in Oakland at the turn of the millennium that Stairs truly became a journeyman — and, in the process, solidified his place in the Immaculate Grid Hall of Fame.

He returned to the National League in 2001, and spent the ensuing three seasons with three clubs all in the Central: Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Brewers and Pittsburgh Pirates. His peak campaign in that stretch came with the Cubs in 2001, when he hit 21 home runs and finished with a 1.5 WAR. Both were marks he not again reach until returning to his Home and Native Land, O Canada, in 2007.

A late-stage career resurgence in his home province of Ontario as a member of the 2007 Toronto Blue Jays resulted in Stairs hitting 21 homers and posting a 2.4 WAR — second-highest of his career behind only a 3.4 WAR 1998.

But it wasn’t until a year later that Matt Stairs solidified his place not merely in Immaculate Grid lore and Canadian baseball history, but the annals of the MLB Postseason.

A trade that sent Fabio Castro to Toronto brought Stairs to Philadelphia in late 2008, and the otherwise marginal move set in motion one of the most important moments of in the Phillies’ then-125 years of existence.

Pinch-hitting in the 2008 NLCS against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Stairs cracked a legendary pinch-hit blast that proved integral to Philadelphia advancing to win the World Series.

He spent another three seasons in MLB, adding to his Immaculate Grid immortality with a return to the franchise where it all began — albeit by then relocated to Washington, D.C. as the Nationals — before closing out in 2011 with the San Diego Padres, giving him the nice round final total of 12 organizations represented.

Matt Stairs will never be inducted into Cooperstown, but that’s OK. Spending 20 years in the Majors, he’s a prime example of the positive impact that the journeyman plays in professional baseball; he became a fall baseball icon; and he’s immortalized not with a bronze bust unveiled just once, but with Immaculate Grid squares revealed to baseball fans almost every day.

1. Shoutout to Press Break’s unofficial Canadian ombudsman.