USA TODAY International Edition
Throwback ace up for Hall after tragic death
USA TODAY is counting down the top 10 candidates on the 2019 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot in advance of the Jan. 22 election results. The countdown is based on voting by our power rankings panel, which includes five Hall voters. Tied at No. 5 is Roy Halladay.
A year after his death in an airplane crash, Halladay makes his debut on the Hall of Fame ballot. The two-time Cy Young winner should easily secure enough votes to be inducted on his first try, but his candidacy has an undeniable gravity after his November 2017 death.
He was a master of his craft. While Randy Johnson intimidated hitters with an upper-90s fastball and Greg Maddux frustrated opponents with his surgeonlike precision, Halladay found the perfect middle ground to become one of the best pitchers of his generation.
Case for: He was never overpowering — despite his imposing 6-6 frame — but used a diverse arsenal of sinkers, sliders and cutters to put hitters in a seemingly impossible situation. “All his pitches start in the same place and end in a different place,” Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira said in 2009.
Over 11 seasons from 2001 to 2011, Halladay went 175-78 with a 2.98 ERA, winning 20 games three times (2003, 2008, 2010) and the Cy Young award twice (2003 and 2010). During that time, only CC Sabathia had more wins than Halladay.
As the fragility of starting pitchers became a major talking point, Halladay remained a workhorse. He tossed an MLB-best 64 complete games from 2001 to 2011, almost double the 34 thrown by the next-best. Only three pitchers logged more innings than Halladay’s 2,300 over that 11-year stretch.
A first-round pick in 1995, Halladay was stuck in Toronto for the first 12 years of his career. He might have been the best pitcher in the game for a good chunk of that stretch, but his team’s anonymity certainly hurt his profile until he went to Philadelphia in 2010.
“If he was in New York or Boston, fans would know more about him,” Raul Ibanez said in 2009. “But in baseball circles, he’s the best.”
Case against: If you want to make a whole thing about wins, then yes, Halladay won only 203 games. Still, his winning percentage (.659) was better than that of recently inducted 300-game winners Maddux, Johnson and Tom Glavine.
X factors: You’d like to see postseason heroics on a Hall of Famer’s resume, and while Halladay made only five such starts, he deservedly owns the narrative, having thrown just the second postseason no-hitter in MLB history. He solidified his big-game credentials in the winner-take-all game of a 2011 National League division series, giving up one run in eight innings, unluckily getting the loss in a 1-0 Phillies defeat.
Though it shouldn’t matter considering he was a shoo-in anyway, Halladay likely gets a posthumous voting boost.
Consensus: Halladay might have not been as flashy or outwardly dominant as contemporaries Johnson or Pedro Martinez, but few pitchers were able to match Halladay’s consistency and longevity in an era largely defined by offense. Expect to see him get voted in.