You could make your own function that will return the minimum of an array from key. There is no necessarily way to use jQuery.
function getMin(arr, key) {
// The object with minimum
var obj;
// The latest minimum on arr[i][key]
var min = Number.MAX_VALUE;
// Iteration through all objects
for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
if(arr[i][key] < min) {
obj = arr[i];
min = arr[i][key];
} // if end
}
return obj;
}
See more, example and run at: http://jsfiddle.net/mL8GA/