Blue Jays’ Ernie Clement “a lover, not a fighter” on the ice
As if Ernie Clement hadn’t already won over the hearts of Canadians with his play with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2025, the reveal that he played hockey as a kid and was really good at it endeared them even more.
Clement dove into his hockey background a little bit more with Lindsay Dunn on The Nation Network’s new show Off The Roster, which covers all things Toronto sports.
Lindsay Dunn sits down with Ernie Clement during "Ernie Clement Day".
The Toronto Blue Jays' infielder received the key to Monroe County and talked about everything: his reaction to the Dylan Cease announcement, Bo Bichette's wedding and his own high school hockey history.…
In the interview, Clement broke down a couple of his hockey highlights from his time with Brighton/HFL/East Rochester in the USHS-NY, a team he played with for all four years in high school, as well as talked about how he’s currently in a beer league and whether or not he fights.
“I’m a lover, I’m not a fighter, and all I care about is putting the puck in the back of the net,” Clement said. “I cherry pick and nobody really yells at me too bad. But not a lot of backchecking going on in those men’s league games.”
Quite frankly, it’s a surprise that he’s even allowed to play such a physical sport when he’s a professional athlete for a completely different sport, so it’s definitely not shocking to find out he doesn’t fight. If anything, he’s probably been told not to, which may also explain his lack of backchecking.
In Clement’s four seasons with Brighton/HFL/East Rochester, he accumulated 70 goals and 54 assists for 124 points in 79 regular season games. While he started off slow in his first season with just five goals and six points in 19 games, he scored above a point-per-game in his second year with 14 goals and 23 points in 20 games before really taking off in his final two seasons, where he had 24 goals & 43 points and 27 goals & 52 points in 20-game seasons.
Clement is coming off of his second full season in the MLB, and third with the Blue Jays, which saw him bat a .277 average, hit nine home runs, and knock home 50 runs batted in. He followed that up with a .411 batting average, one home run and nine RBIs during the Jays’ playoff run to the World Series, where they came close to winning their first title since 1993, even leading the series 3-2 at one point, but ultimately lost in extra innings in Game 7.