One of the most recognizable symbols in Canadian professional sports has a little-known Spanish connection. The original Toronto Blue Jays logo, unveiled in 1976 ahead of the franchise’s Major League Baseball debut, was created by the Toronto design firm Savage Sloan. Among the people directly involved was Paco Belsué, a Spanish draftsman from Jaca, Aragón, who had moved to Canada years earlier.
Belsué’s role remained largely unknown outside design circles and Toronto’s Spanish immigrant community. Yet the image he helped shape — a blue jay, a baseball and a red maple leaf — became inseparable from the identity of Canada’s only current Major League Baseball franchise.
Official Blue Jays records credit the original design to Savage Sloan and specifically identify Belsué as part of the team behind it, alongside Richard Walker, then director of creative services at Labatt Brewing Company. Canadian design archive Canada Modern also lists Belsué, Dave Savage and Walker as designers of the 1977 trademark.
From Jaca to Toronto
Belsué arrived in Toronto in 1968, leaving behind a Spain still under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and entering a Canadian advertising industry that offered considerably more professional opportunities for graphic designers and illustrators.
He eventually joined Savage Sloan Ltd. When Toronto was awarded an American League expansion franchise, the agency became involved in creating an identity for the new baseball club.
The name Blue Jays had been selected after a public contest that generated thousands of suggestions. The logo then had to solve a very Canadian design problem: how to connect a baseball team, a bird and a national identity without making the result overly complicated.
The solution proved remarkably durable.
The original mark showed the profile of a blue jay over a baseball, accompanied by a red maple leaf. Around it appeared the Toronto Blue Jays name in distinctive split lettering. The logo was unveiled on October 8, 1976, and made its MLB debut when the Blue Jays played their first game on April 7, 1977.
Belsué was responsible for much of the detailed drafting, although the final identity emerged from a broader creative process involving Savage Sloan and Labatt. That distinction matters because the original history often reduced the creation of the logo to a single designer. What survives today is better understood as a collaborative project in which the Spanish artist played a documented role.
A logo linked to Toronto’s greatest baseball era
The first Blue Jays identity remained essentially intact for two decades, from the franchise’s debut through the 1996 season.
During that period Toronto evolved from an expansion club into one of Major League Baseball’s strongest teams. The Blue Jays won the American League East five times between 1985 and 1993 and reached the defining moment in franchise history with consecutive World Series championships in 1992 and 1993.
That logo therefore became associated with Roberto Alomar, Joe Carter, Dave Stieb, George Bell, Tony Fernández, John Olerud and other players who built the club’s most successful era.
The 1993 championship remains particularly embedded in Canadian sports culture because of Carter’s walk-off home run against the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 6 of the World Series.
For years afterward, even as the organization changed its visual identity, the original design retained an emotional connection with supporters.
The return of the classic Blue Jays identity
Toronto abandoned the original primary logo after the 1996 season and experimented with several designs over the following 15 years.
The franchise made its biggest departure in 2004, when black, graphite and silver became prominent and the traditional baseball-and-maple-leaf composition disappeared from the primary mark.
That experiment did not last.
In November 2011, the Blue Jays unveiled a redesigned identity for the 2012 season that deliberately returned to the visual language of the original logo. MLB Design Services worked with the club on a modernized blue jay head, baseball, maple leaf and split-letter typography.
The connection with the 1977 design was unmistakable.
The organization made another adjustment in 2020, simplifying the primary logo further by emphasizing the bird head, baseball and maple leaf. That remains the core identity of the franchise in 2026. The Blue Jays themselves divide their logo history into six periods — 1977-1996, 1997-2002, 2003, 2004-2011, 2012-2019 and 2020 to the present.
Fifty seasons later, Paco Belsué’s idea survives
The story has acquired additional relevance in 2026, when the Blue Jays are celebrating their 50th season.
Toronto has used the anniversary to reconnect with its history. In July, the club unveiled a statue outside Rogers Centre commemorating the back-to-back World Series championships of 1992 and 1993. In August, it opened a new Hall of Excellence honoring figures such as George Bell, Carlos Delgado, José Bautista, Tony Fernández, Roberto Alomar, Joe Carter and Dave Stieb.
The visual identity surrounding those celebrations still carries the fundamental elements established when the franchise was born.
Paco Belsué died in Toronto in October 2011, only weeks before the Blue Jays officially presented the redesigned logo that restored much of the aesthetic he had helped create more than three decades earlier.
His name never achieved anything close to the recognition of the baseball stars who wore the symbol. But every Blue Jays cap containing that familiar bird and red maple leaf carries part of a design story that began with a Spanish immigrant from Aragón.
Almost 50 years after Toronto played its first Major League game, that connection remains visible throughout Rogers Centre, on jerseys and caps across Canada and anywhere the Blue Jays take the field.
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