What I Loved About Roy Halladay

When a baseball player dies, as Roy Halladay did yesterday, it can be difficult to know what to say. I never met Roy Halladay. I don’t have any personal anecdotes to share or any insight into who he was as a person. I don’t know his family. I only knew him through the television, when I watched him work. And you can’t really know a person that way.

The people that really did know Roy Halladay seemed enamored of him. In awe of him, not just as a player, but as a person. In the last 24 hours, the universal reaction within the baseball community has been that the game lost not just a guy who was great at pitching, but an ambassador for the sport. The stories that have emerged are both heartbreaking and inspiring. Stories like Jayson Werth’s:

“For a guy that was very serious, quiet and reserved, I can remember it like it was yesterday, the look on his face to see us waiting for him to celebrate together,” Werth said. “He loved the game but played for his teammates, for us to love him back like that you could tell it meant a lot. I’d never seen him so genuinely happy. I’ll never forget the expression on his face.”

I never got to see that Roy Halladay. Most of us probably don’t have that kind of connection with him, but yet, there is still the natural desire to mourn. For most of us, Roy Halladay wasn’t really part of our lives anymore, but it still feels like we lost something. So, today, while acknowledging that our loss cannot compare to the sort endured by those who knew him in a more personal way, I’d like to honor the Roy Halladay I did know.

This guy.

From 2002 through 2011, Roy Halladay was something close to the perfect pitcher. Over 10 years, he threw almost 2,200 innings in 303 starts. That’s better than seven innings per start for a 10-year period. Exactly one major-league pitcher (Corey Kluber, 7.02 IP/GS) averaged better than seven innings per start this year, and Kluber only made 29 of them. Halladay was the definition of a workhorse, but he wasn’t just pitching deep because his managers didn’t understand the times-through-the-order penalty; they did it because Halladay was seemingly immune to it.

Hitters performed more or less the same against Halladay when facing him a third time as they did their first time up, and they were worst off when facing him a second time. Unlike most mortals, Roy Halladay just didn’t get worse as the game wore on. He was great early, he was great in the middle, and he was great at the end.

While we’ve been some of the loudest advocates here for the advantages gained by extending bullpens in the postseason, Halladay was a pitcher who legitimately didn’t need the help. He gave his teammates the night off more often than just about anyone else, and even when he didn’t throw all nine innings, he frequently left just five or six outs remaining when he exited. Pitching at a time when the game was evolving away from dominant starting pitchers, Halladay was a reminder of what a legitimate ace looks like.

But perhaps more than anything else, what I’ll remember about Halladay is how different his career could have gone. Like many highly touted pitching prospects, Halladay didn’t exactly dominate from day one. His 1999 rookie season looked good on the surface — he recorded a a 79 ERA- — but his 82/79 K/BB ratio was problematic, and his 112 FIP- showed that those results probably weren’t going to last without missing more bats. And in 2000, everything fell apart: he ran a 10.64 ERA in 68 innings, a mark that remains the highest in major-league history for a pitcher with 50 or more innings in a season.

Halladay wasn’t very good back in Triple-A after the eventual demotion, either, so to begin the 2001 season, the Blue Jays assigned him back to the High-A Florida State League and stuck him in the bullpen. Halladay was tasked with re-imagining his mechanics and his approach to the mental side of baseball a year after being regarded as the Blue Jays’ ace of the future.

And he did just that. Halladay fixed what he needed to fix in the minors, returning to the majors mid-season and immediately establishing himself as the second-best starter in the American League, behind only some guy named Pedro Martinez. Halladay put up +4 WAR in a half-season that began with him in A-ball retooling his mechanics.

And that began a run of dominance that didn’t stop until his body finally betrayed him at age 35. He nearly became just another flameout top prospect who couldn’t get big leaguers out. Within a few months of hitting rock bottom, though, he made himself unhittable and stayed that way for over a decade. He basically lived out the hero’s journey on the biggest stage baseball has to offer.

And that is one of the reasons why, when Halladay retired in 2013, I called him a “deserving Hall of Famer” and compared him multiple times to Sandy Koufax. He didn’t have the longevity for which some voters look, but his extended run of greatness simply can’t be ignored.

Roy Halladay was one of the best pitchers I’ve ever seen. He belongs in Cooperstown. I have no doubt he’ll get there now, but he belonged even before this tragedy took him from us too early. We might not get to see his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, but Roy Halladay spoiled us with a Hall of Fame career.

By most accounts, he was also a Hall of Fame person. I’m envious of those who got to know that side of him. I’ll only ever know him as a baseball player, but I will always remember him as one of the best I’ve ever seen.