This morning at Hall of Very Good (and it may well have appeared in dozens of other places as well, but I happened to notice it on HOVG's Twitter feed), it was noted that by holding the Reds to a run on three hits in the Cubs' 4-1 win on Wednesday night, Ryan Dempster took over sole possession of second place on the all-time wins list among pitchers born in Canada, with 107. (Fergie Jenkins, of course, has a firm hold on first, at 284; Dempster surpassed the surprisingly-similar-to-him Kirk McCaskill.)
While that's just not a terribly impressive number (even if you care about pitcher "wins," as I do not) no matter how many your countrymen have managed, there's something pretty interesting about that. Canada is actually the fourth most prolific non-US country at producing baseball players, with 233 -- one more than Puerto Rico, 27 fewer than Venezuela, nearly three hundred fewer than the Dominican Republic. (By contrast, California has had 1,985.) It's just interesting that of all those Canadians, more than half (119) of whom have made pitching appearances in the bigs, (a) Dempster is your #2 in a big mainstream stat like wins, and (b) that number is as low as 107.
Anyway, I want to do justice to some of the many other countries that have produced MLB players, but considerably fewer of them than Canada has. Here are some statistical leaders for players born in some other countries (* = min. 1000 IP or PA; click on the country name to see Baseball-Reference's full list from that country):
