HALLADAY VOTED INTO BASEBALL HALL OF FAME
Rivera becomes first unanimous pick; Martinez, Mussina also make the grade
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.
Also on Tuesday, Mariano Rivera became baseball’s first unanimous Hall of Fame selection, elected along with Halladay, Edgar Martinez and Mike Mussina. Rivera received all 425 votes in balloting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. The quartet will be enshrined in Cooperstown along with Today’s Game Era Committee selections Harold Baines and Lee Smith on July 21.
Maple Ridge, B.C., native Larry Walker, a former National League MVP with the Colorado Rockies, was on the ballot for a ninth year. He received 54.6 per cent of the vote, a significant jump from the 34.1 per cent he received in 2018, garnering 232 votes of 319 needed.
The Jays drafted Halladay 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 earned-run average as a 19-year-old 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 was 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 the minors out of spring training the next year.
It was there, Ash said, where Halladay’s determination and inner fire came to the 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 in 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.”
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.
“We made some slight mechanical changes with him, he developed another pitch, the cutter,” Ash said. “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 spent 12 of his 16 Major League seasons in Toronto (1998-2009), pitching more than 2,000 innings for the Jays and winning the American League Cy Young in 2003. He represented Toronto six times at the all-star game (he was chosen for eight overall), had three 20-win seasons and five with 200 or more strikeouts, and earned the National League 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.” With files from The Associated Press