We propose, for the first time, a transmission grating stretcher for high power lasers and demonstrate its superiority over conventional, reflective gold grating stretchers in terms of pulse temporal quality. We show that, compared to a conventional stretcher with the same stretching factor, the transmission-grating based stretcher yields more than an order of magnitude improvement in the contrast pedestal. We have also quantitatively characterized the roughness of the grating surfaces and estimated its impact on the contrast pedestal.