Halladay gave a master class day before death
Blue Jays and Phillies great didn’t show young players his two-seam fastball, but how to tackle mental challenges
Roy Halladay stood at the front of a conference room in Clearwater, Fla. He was there, on the second floor of the Phillies’ Carpenter Complex, to lead a presentation for a group of minor league players. He was there — roughly 24 hours before his death in a plane crash on Nov. 7— to teach.
The Phillies hired Halladay in March as a mental skills coach for the minor-leaguers who played and trained in Florida. He worked five days a week and had his own office, which included a massage chair. Baseball’s mental side became Halladay’s obsession after he resurrected his career in the early 2000s under the guidance of a sports psychologist named Harvey Dorfman.
Halladay met throughout the season with players both individually and in group sessions such as this. He did not teach them his two-seam fastball, but instead how to tackle the mental challenges that lie ahead.
“I was pretty star-struck at first,” said Luke Leftwich, a 23-year-old right-hander who finished the season with high-A Clearwater. “But he was just so easy to talk to. He’s one of the greatest pitchers ever, and he was just such a normal guy. It was really easy to want to talk to him.”
The Phillies began courting Halladay four years ago, when he retired from playing. Ruben Amaro Jr., who had tried tirelessly to acquire Halladay before getting him in December 2009, hoped the pitcher would stay with the Phillies as a coach. Halladay, wanting to spend time with his wife Brandy and two sons Braden and Ryan, deferred.
The pursuit continued as Scott Proefrock, an assistant general manager to both Amaro and Matt Klentak, kept in touch. A deal seemed close before the 2016 season, but Halladay, who coached his son’s youth baseball teams, backed out. He finally joined the Phillies before last season, first as a spring training instructor and then as a mentee to Geoff Miller, who was hired four months earlier as the team’s first mental-skills coach.
“I’ve always been hesitant to entertain a former player without any formal education doing this kind of work,” Miller said.
“Sitting down with Roy, he really changed my mind about it. For a few reasons. One is the 13 years he spent with Harvey Dorfman. He knew Harvey’s work forward and backward. I don’t think many former players were that devoted to it. And the other piece is that he was so humble. He was very quick to recognize where his limits were in the work he was doing and to ask for help and seek additional knowledge. He was just so interested in helping others.”
Halladay’s office sat just 150 metres from the clubhouse of the Clearwater Threshers, the Phillies affiliate in the Florida State League.
Halladay posted two sheets on the clubhouse bulletin board. One was to reserve his office massage chair. The other was to schedule one-on-one meetings.
Halladay, a baseball great, had office hours. It was quite the opportunity.
“We would just talk about life,” said Jeff Singer, a left-hander from South Jersey who grew up a rabid Phillies fan. “You could talk to him about anything, which was awesome. When you walked into that office, you didn’t feel like you were going to meet Roy Halladay. It just felt like anyone else.”
Halladay ended each session by giving the player a set of two books by Dorfman, in whom he had immersed himself when Toronto demoted him in 2001to single A after a historically rough beginning to his major league career. Halladay gave each player a notebook and instructed each to jot down notes throughout the season.
Singer remembered watching Halladay’s perfect game and no-hitter while dictating each play over the phone to his brother, who was away at college and could not watch.
Then he sat in Halladay’s office and told him how he had struggled to record the third out of an inning. Halladay listened and gave Singer an exercise to clear his mind that he had used during his own career.
“It was a block of 100 numbers and there’s one number in each block. You had to go from 99 to one. Look for 99, cross it out. Look for 98, cross it out. 97, cross it out. All the way to one,” Singer said.
“He had me do that before the game, and it really cleared my mind and helped me get locked in. He told me his best score was two minutes and 35 seconds. He said he was awful his first time so it would be OK if I finished in six or seven minutes. My first time was14 minutes, 20 seconds. He just started laughing.”
Leftwich found that he and Halladay they had similar upbringings. Halladay told the pitcher about the pressure he once felt to perform well to please his father.
“And a big change for him was when he gave himself an internal look,” Leftwich said. “‘Why am I doing this? I’m doing this because I love it. I’m not doing this just for them. I want to do this because I love it and this is what I want to do with my life.’ ”
Last Monday’s lecture, the final lesson Halladay would give, was for a group of players from the Phillies’ strength and conditioning camp. He geared his speech toward working out. He talked of how important it is to give a full effort in the gym when no one is watching. He told them how to battle the mental grind of spring training.
“He was just giving us a piece of what helped him,” said Connor Brogdon, a 22-year-old right-hander drafted last June. “He said when he was coming up that there was always an argument of what came first: success or confidence? He said he found out it was neither. It was preparation that came first. I’ll never forget that.”
Brogdon was in Spanish class last Tuesday — the Phillies offer lan- guage courses to minor-leaguers at their complex — when he noticed a teammate on his phone.
Brogdon gave him a look, but the player said he was monitoring something serious on Twitter. Another teacher then entered the room and broke the news: Roy Halladay, who just a day earlier had taught in the same building, died after crashing his plane into the Gulf of Mexico. Class ended immediately. “It was instant silence,” Brogdon said. “We looked around at each other and were just at a loss for words. We all just packed up our things and left. We didn’t even say a word.”
Halladay’s time in this role was short. But his impact was large. The Phillies hoped that he would work with them for years. Maybe he would become their major league pitching coach. Or perhaps he would stay in his Clearwater office with that massage chair. Halladay had so much more to give.
“That’s what (stinks) the most. He was such a good person, and the whole place looked up to him,” Leftwich said. “It was so great to have him around. It will definitely be tough to go back for spring training and him not being there. We’re a strong group, and I know we’re definitely going to play in his honour.”