WAY TO GO, ROY!
More than just his skill, Roy Halladay’s inner fire and mental toughness propelled him into Cooperstown
Former Blue Jays general manager Gord Ash remembers Roy Halladay — who on Tuesday became the second Toronto player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame — as someone whose tenacity and mental toughness matched his physical attributes as a Major League pitcher.
The Jays drafted Hall a day 17th overall in 1995 and it became clear almost instantly that the big right-hander was the real deal. Halladay went 15-7 with a 2.93 as a 19-yearold in his second year of pro ball (class-A in Dunedin) and made it to the big leagues by 1998. But though he had initial success in the bigs, the 2000 season turned out to be a disaster for Halladay (putting up a 10.64 ERA over 67.2 innings, the worst ERA in history among pitchers who threw at least 60 innings in a season) and the Jays decided to send him back to A-ball out of spring training the next year. It was there, said Ash, where Halladay’s determination and inner fire came to forefront and resulted in the late, great pitcher (Halladay died in a plane crash at age 40 in 2017) turning his career around to the point where he became one of the greatest starting pitchers in recent history. Ash called Halladay’s inclusion into Cooperstown a great honour for the Blue Jays organization and a testament to Halladay’s will to always improve.
“When you draft a player, you like a player, but I don’t think you ever think in terms of him being a hall of famer,” said Ash, thinking back to 1995 when the Jays chose Halladay out of Arvada West High School in Colorado. “So yes, he exceeded everyone’s expectations. But he didn’t do it the easy way. He had initial success, he had that near no-hitter against Detroit (his second career start in 1998), and then he was kind of mediocre for a couple of years and we decided after a meeting with him, after a horrendous spring training, that maybe it was best that he went back to the minor leagues.”
Using a tough love approach, pitching coach Mel Queen overhauled Halladay’s delivery and after stops at three different levels in 2001, Halladay made it back to the Jays and never looked back.
“He did a lot of his own work on the mental side of the game, focus and concentration, and gained back some of the confidence that eroded over the past couple of years,” said Ash of Halladay’s initial struggles. “We made some slight mechanical changes with him, he developed another pitch, the cutter. And the cutter and sinker really became his bread and butter and that’s what propelled him. That cutter looked a lot like a fastball and hitters had a tough time with it. And he had such excellent command.
“But it was Roy who had to put in the work,” Ash said. “He was the guy that kind of had to reinvent himself and did it very quickly and did it very efficiently.”
Halladay ended up spending 12 of his 16 Major League seasons in Toronto (19982009), pitching more than 2,000 innings for the Jays and winning the AL League Cy Young in 2003. He represented Toronto six times at the all-star game (chosen for eight overall) had three 20-win seasons and five with 200 or more strikeouts, and earned the Cy Young Award with the Phillies in 2010 in his first season in Philadelphia.
“He was just very, very tenacious,” said Ash, the Jays GM from 1995 to 2001 and now the VP of Baseball Projects for the Milwaukee Brewers. “He loved to pitch complete games. His ERA in the ninth was the best ERA of any inning he pitched. When he got to the end, he could sense the finish line and he was going to battle and be competitive right to the end.”
There is some debate as to what team Halladay will represent when his name is formally enshrined in the Hall later this year, though it’s widely believed that it will be the Jays. Though he did some amazing things in Philly, including throwing a perfect game and recording the second no-hitter in MLB postseason history (both in 2010),
“Doc” expressed a desire to retire as a Blue Jay and signed a one-day contract with Toronto in Dec. 2013 to do just that. Needless to say, Halladay’s selection in 1995 remains the best draft pick in Jays history.
“We liked Roy. We liked the size, we had a bit of an ‘in’ with our scout in Colorado, who was also his pitching coach as a youngster (Bus Campbell) so we knew him very well, we knew his work ethic, we knew his physical presence,” Ash said. “Pat Gillick had retired as our GM but he was doing some scouting for us at the time and Moose Johnson, one of our senior scouts, saw him and also recommended him highly. So it was a selection, when our turn came, that was made pretty easily. You’re always concerned about the high school right-handers but we just had so much insight (on him). We knew him probably better than anyone else in the draft and that probably was
the key factor.”
Ash added one more point about Halladay. He said if there was a Hall of Fame for athletes who do good work in the community, Halladay would be in that too.
“I think that is an overlooked part of his career,” said the Toronto-born baseball executive. “He did that quietly because he didn’t want to be
noticed for that. He was just a tremendous person.”