McCaffery: Halladay made Philly fans feel just perfect
Some arrive through drafts. Some are lured with trails of cash. Some are traded to Philadelphia, look around, and try to figure out what happened. Some make it there as a last career resort. Few came to Philadelphia the way Roy Halladay came to the Phillies.
Few, then, will leave so many Phillies fans saddened, now that he is gone.
Halladay died Tuesday when the plane he owned and was piloting crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. He was just 40, here, then gone, too, too soon. In that, his Phillies career — just four years — would be a fair reflection of his professional life: Quick but brilliant, and so tough for the fans to let go.
By all things reasonable, Halladay will be enshrined in Cooperstown within the next two years, the great right-hander of his generation. His plaque will reflect him wearing a Blue Jays cap. Of course. He was Toronto’s superstar, first and longest.
But he was Philadelphia’s star, too. And he would have been one even if he didn’t pitch a perfect game and a postseason no-hitter, even if he didn’t win a Cy Young Award or help the Phillies to two firstplace finishes. He belonged to Philadelphia because he wanted to belong to Philadelphia. And in Philadelphia, nothing matters more.
“We had some very good teams in ’08 and ’09, but we felt we needed more starting pitching,” said David Montgomery, who was in charge of the operation at the time. “There was opportunity to pick up Roy Halladay. I’m doing this off memory, but we had significant discussions with Toronto at the trade deadline and for one reason or another, it didn’t come to fruition. But the good thing for us was it laid the foundation, and Roy had thought about whether he wanted to pitch here because he had the ‘no-trade.’ One of the things that pleased us was it was a marriage of two parties that wanted to get together. Roy wanted to be here and we certainly wanted Roy Halladay.
“It didn’t take him too long to prove his worth, obviously.”
There may have been other examples of such a desire to play professional sports in Philadelphia, but none would precisely match the Halladay situation. He was not at the end of his career. He wasn’t at the beginning. He was 32, had just unfolded a 2.79 ERA, and was unquestionably one of the dominant starting pitchers in the game.
That the Phillies were special at the time made them appealing. But Halladay didn’t need to make it so clear that he’d throw his no-trade rider in the shredder at 95 mph if Toronto wished to move him to the Phils. That the Phillies didn’t push the idea harder in 2009, preferring to keep Domonic Brown rather than flip him for Halladay, meant they would not be back-to-back champions. Yet that only made it more notable that Halladay still wanted to play for that team, at that time, for that manager and that fan base in that stadium.
“I’ll never forget the description when we were able to acquire him,” Montgomery said. “We were getting one of the best pitchers in baseball for sure. But we were also getting one of the best people in baseball, for sure.”
That the Phillies somehow managed to forget to retain Cliff Lee as they were making the Halladay move would cost them yet another world championship. But a year later, when Lee was a free agent, he famously re-signed with the Phillies despite a better offer from the Yankees. So Lee, too, would forever be bound to a fan base by his desire to come to Philadelphia.
There have been superstars in Philadelphia, before and after Halladay’s arrival. Most were developed internally, like Allen Iverson and Eric Lindros. Plenty arrived too late in their legendary careers to help; the Flyers have tried too often to milk one more Stanley Cup out of an end-of-the-line former star.
In too many cases, and Charles Barkley was one, superstars were more likely to try to campaign themselves away from Broad and Pattison. There were also situations like the one with Jim Thome, whose willingness to become a Phillie at a time when that was unpopular made him an eternal fan favorite. However, it did take the Phillies paying him above market price to make that happen.
With Halladay, it was simple: He wanted to take his talents to South Philly, and to work for the contract that he’d already signed. For that, as Charlie Manuel said, “His contributions to the Phillies can’t be measured.”
Wins can be measured, and velocity can be calculated, and no-hitters can be tabulated. But there is only one way to measure the value of a player like Roy Halladay willingly, aggressively making an organization a trendy destination.
That would be not to measure how long he was here. It would be to feel the sadness when he was gone.