“I believed in Roy, but I also believed if we were going to make it work, he had to go back to square one and start over,” Ash said. “He needed to be rebuilt.”
Major League Baseball is no place for a rebuilding job, at least not for the total makeover that Halladay needed. Jays officials decided that he would go back—way back—to the minor leagues. The guy who nearly pitched a no-hitter in his second big-league start was sent all the way to the low minors—the Jays’ Class A affiliate in Dunedin, Florida—at the start of the 2001 season.
Demotions are usually handled by the GM and manager of a ball club. The Jays knew that Halladay would be humiliated by the decision, so they had Tim Hewes, their in-house counselor and player-assistance provider, deliver the news. The baseball people followed up with Halladay afterward.
“It was a very emotional time for Roy,” Ash said. “There was a heavy burden on him and we wanted to make sure it was handled in a professional way.”
Halladay was not completely blindsided by the news. Martinez, the manager, had previously called him aside on the field and given him a heads-up.
“Before that I had no clue it was coming,” Halladay said. “I was surprised. I thought it was pretty radical. Leading up to it, I never heard, ‘We think you need a lot of changes.’ I struggled the year before, but I never really got the feeling, ‘We think you’re way off.’ ”
But that’s just what Jays officials were thinking.
“We’d watch him throw and say, ‘How in the hell is he getting hit like this?’ ” said Martinez, a former major-league catcher. “Finally, we kind of broke it down. He stood tall and was easy to see. He was over the top. His fastball was 97 but straight as a string. He had a big curveball but nobody swung at it.
“We just said, ‘You know, he’s 6-6, has a great arm, he’s young, he’s too good of a talent. There’s got to be a way to figure this out.’ We just thought going back to square one was the best thing for him in the long haul.”
Halladay did not fight the Jays’ decision.
“He couldn’t,” Martinez said. “He was struggling to make the team.”
Turns out, the demotion was the best thing that ever happened to Halladay’s career. In body and mind, he became a different pitcher, the pitcher he’d always dreamed of becoming.
All Harry Leroy Halladay III ever wanted to be was a pitcher. Well, he wanted to be a pilot, too, like his dad, but pitching was definitely first on his list. When Halladay was in fifth grade, the family moved into a new house in the Denver area. His parents made sure the basement was at least 61 feet long so their only son—Roy has two sisters—could throw and hit balls into a mattress throughout the cold Colorado winter. When young Roy was about 10, his father took him to a pitching clinic hosted by a legendary Denver-area pitching coach named Bus Campbell.
“We’d really love to work with you,” the elder Halladay told Campbell, who heard things like that all the time. Campbell knew the Halladays were serious when they tracked him down a second time. It was the start of a close teacher-pupil relationship that lasted until Campbell’s death in 2008.
“Bus was this soft-spoken guy who could stand behind you and watch you throw twenty pitches and completely analyze everything you were doing,” recalled Brad Lidge, another Denver-area pitcher who worked with Campbell. “I remember the first time I worked with him. He was so quiet, I had to say, ‘What?’ about ten times because he was so soft-spoken. But he was really good at relating to pitchers and helping them with their deliveries. I don’t know if all the pitchers in the Denver area worked with him, but the lucky ones did.”
Campbell’s prized pupil was another quiet guy—Halladay. In time, Campbell became a scout for Toronto, the team that picked Halladay in the first round of the 1995 draft. Halladay listened and followed through on everything Campbell told him. Before Halladay’s senior year at Arvada West High School, Campbell suggested that the pitcher join the cross-country team to build endurance and leg strength, two keys for a pitcher. Halladay, who still logs the miles of a cross-country runner between starts, laughs when he recalls his first race.
“I was in first place after a mile and ended up coming in about two-hundredth,” he said. “I was dead-sprint for the first mile then hit a wall. After that, I learned.”
Halladay ended the season as the No. 2 man on his team and had a couple of fourth-place finishes in sectional meets.
If cross-country was conditioning for pitching, then basketball was Halladay’s escape from baseball and the expectations that had engulfed him as he had become a pitching prodigy. He played center on his high school team.
“I loved playing basketball,” he said. “Sometimes I had more fun playing it in high school than baseball. I just wasn’t very good. I could go out and if I was terrible, I didn’t know any better. I expected to be terrible. So when I had a good game it was kind of fun. It was recreation.”
By the spring, it was showtime for Halladay. No more conditioning. No more recreation. It was time to produce, and he did that. College and pro scouts flocked to his games at Arvada West. He had decided to attend the University of Arizona, but the lure of pro ball, of making the majors, was too strong and he signed with the Jays after the draft. No one in the Denver area was surprised that Halladay signed. Few first-rounders don’t. And besides, Halladay had practically been raised to be a major-leaguer. It’s all he ever wanted. Pitching was his identity.
And that’s why his poor season in 2000 and his demotion from the majors to the low minors the following spring was so jarring to him. That’s why he was so happy that he and his wife, Brandy, had moved their residence from the Denver area to Florida that winter.
“The hard part for me was the thought of going home and telling people in my town,” he said. “Jeez, I just got sent to A ball. I might never get out of A ball. It’s awful hard when you grow up and are known as a baseball player from the time you’re six and now you have to tell people in that hometown that you failed. Moving to Florida took a lot of pressure off me. It was a fresh start. Baseball wasn’t my identity there. I could go out and try to be as good as I could be. I didn’t have to do it for anyone else. It made it easier for me to put my heart into it and not feel like if I don’t do this, I’m disappointing all these people.”
When the Jays departed Dunedin for the regular season in 2001, Halladay stayed behind.
He was a minor-leaguer. He didn’t know if he’d ever get back to the majors—never mind pitch a perfect game and a playoff no-hitter nine years later for the team that once passed on him—and he was crushed.
Talk to Roy Halladay for a few minutes and you soon realize that his favorite pronoun is “we.” When he joined the Phillies in December 2009, he sat in a packed news conference and spoke of Philadelphia as the place “we” wanted to be. He was referring to the woman sitting in the front row at the news conference, his wife, Brandy. The couple began dating in Colorado in 1996 and married in 1998. Brandy Halladay was there for her husband’s ascension to the majors and his fall back to the minors.
Only closers get saves in baseball, but Brandy Halladay deserved one in the spring of 2001. Her husband, just 23 at the time, was confused and dejected. His career was going the wrong way and he didn’t know which way to turn. Brandy headed to a bookstore near Dunedin and purchased a handful of self-help books. On a whim, she breezed through an aisle of sports books and came across The Mental ABCs of Pitching by noted sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman. She bought it, thinking there might be something in there to help restore her husband’s bruised confidence.
Within those pages was Roy Halladay’s road map to stardom.
Halladay devoured the book, ate up everything Dorfman had to say about concentration, having a plan, focusing on one pitch at a time, and learning from failure. From pitchers such as Greg Maddux and Jamie Moyer, to players such as Raul Ibanez, Dorfman had helped a number of major-leaguers enhance their physical performances with a sharper, stronger mind-set. No player was mor
e affected by Dorfman than Halladay. He read the book—lived it—and with the help of Jays officials, eventually became close to Dorfman through a decade’s worth of phone calls, emails, and personal meetings.
After first reading Dorfman’s book, Halladay said he realized “the talent was there, but a lot was missing.”
“I was very distracted by the big picture,” he said. “I’d go out and think about having to go seven innings with three runs or less, who I was facing, and all this other stuff. It was never simple. There was just too much going on. I was never worried about executing the pitch. I was worried about everything else. I was very distracted. That’s the best way to put it.”
More than a decade after reading the book, Halladay still thumbs through it nights before he pitches. In the winter before the 2011 season, he addressed a group of about a dozen Phillies pitching prospects at a minicamp in Clearwater. He gave each pitcher a copy of the book.
On the morning of March 1, 2011, during spring training, Halladay got a call from Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr. Dorfman had died in North Carolina after an illness. He was 75.
When Halladay won the 2003 AL Cy Young Award, he singled out Dorfman as a reason for his success. Eight years later, and four months after winning the NL Cy Young as a Phillie, Halladay continued to credit Dorfman.
“I’m certain I would never have had the success I’ve had if it weren’t for the time I spent with him and the things I learned from him,” Halladay said. “He helped me turn the corner—professionally and personally. He made all the difference.”
Geoff Baker observed the difference that Dorfman made in Halladay from a reporter’s perspective in Toronto. Before Dorfman, Halladay tried to accommodate every person who pulled on him. After Dorfman, Halladay started to politely say no. His day became so structured and his mind so focused that the only time reporters were able to get to him was after a start. A one-on-one interview would require an appointment that wouldn’t interfere with Halladay’s daily routine. Halladay even turned down opportunities to do commercials in Toronto. Nothing would break the concentration that he learned from Dorfman. And if something did . . . Zap.
“Roy doesn’t have a bad bone in his body,” Baker said. “He was saying yes to everybody. Dorfman convinced him he had to start saying no or he wasn’t going to make it. He had to concentrate on himself.”
Halladay confirmed that. He was a pleaser and if he kept it up he was going to be a pleaser in another profession.
“I always felt like I had to try to please everybody—coaches, family, media—everybody,” he said. “I wanted them to not only be proud of me but to think good things of me. I think everybody naturally wants that. Harvey helped a lot with that. He’d tell me, ‘The ultimate reason you’re here is to pitch. You have to be able to do this for yourself. Know what you need and what you don’t need.’
“One of the best things he ever told me was, ‘Stick with your routine. Stick with your way of thinking. Don’t let people change that.’ ”
There were others who helped in Roy Halladay’s transition from near washout to the best pitcher in baseball. Halladay found himself talking about another person of impact when Mel Queen died in May 2011, less than three months after Dorfman had passed away.
While Dorfman had helped Halladay build the right mind-set to succeed in the majors, Queen had helped him build a delivery and pitch repertoire that would work.
Queen, who pitched in the majors from 1964–72, was a longtime Jays’ pitching instructor. He got hold of Halladay when the Jays sent him from Dunedin to Double-A Knoxville early in the 2001 season. The first thing Queen did was berate Halladay. He told the pitcher he was soft. He called him a wimp. He gave him the old you’re-too-good-for-this lecture while questioning his manhood the whole way.
“He kicked me in the ass,” Halladay said after Queen’s death. “He challenged me. I think sometimes you need that. You need the honesty.”
Once Queen got the old-school, drill-sergeant stuff out of the way, he went to work on the delivery. He killed Iron Mike, that straight-up-and-down delivery that allowed hitters a good look at the ball. He taught Halladay to start his delivery with a slight step back from the rubber to create some north-south momentum toward home plate. He junked the over-the-top release point and lowered Halladay’s arm angle to about three-quarters. That and a couple of new grips added movement—sinking and cutting action—to Halladay’s straight fastball, making it more difficult to hit. A little shoulder tuck was added to hide the ball.
Halladay worked on these adjustments for two weeks in the bullpen, with Queen often breathing fire down his neck.
“After fifteen days I was able to take it all out in a game,” Halladay said. “It was night and day.”
The deaths of Dorfman and Queen, and Campbell three years earlier, touched Halladay deeply.
“This makes you step back and realize how many influential people you’ve had in your career, and how many people you really owe a lot of credit and gratitude to,” he said in May 2011. “You obviously can’t do it by yourself. Things like that kind of bring that to the forefront.”
It’s typical of Halladay to share credit. Heck, this is the guy who didn’t leave out anyone, not even the batboy, when he bought $4,000 gift watches for his teammates and others after his May 2010 perfect game. But everyone from Gord Ash, the man who came up with the plan for Halladay to start over at square one, to Buck Martinez, Toronto’s manager at the time, say the credit begins and ends with one person—Roy Halladay.
“Roy did the work,” Martinez said. “He deserves all the credit. He could have flipped us off and told us to go to hell. He could have said, ‘I’ll go down, but I’m not going to do anything.’ But to his credit, he made a commitment. He went from being a borderline failure, Number One pick, maybe out of the game, getting his brains beaten out, to the best pitcher in baseball. I remember catching him in the bullpen when he came back. It was pretty special.”
A new pitcher with a new mind-set, Halladay climbed his way back to the majors in July 2001. Slowly, he established himself as the best in the game. He won 19 games and had a 2.93 ERA in 2002. He won the Cy Young Award a year later.
There are stages to a ballplayer’s career: 1. Establish yourself as a major leaguer; 2. Make a lot of money; 3. Get a ring. Over the years, Halladay reached the first two stages, but by 2009 it was pretty clear to him that he was going to have difficulty reaching the third stage in Toronto. The Jays played in a tough division with the high-powered and deep-pocketed Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. At 32 years old, Halladay didn’t see how the rebuilding Jays were going to catch those two clubs, at least not while he still had bullets left in his right arm.
Halladay was due to become a free agent at the end of the 2010 season and he had made it clear to Jays officials that he would sign elsewhere, with a contender, when his deal expired. During the first half of the 2009 season, he quietly asked the Jays to consider trading him to a contender. Jays officials were under no obligation to deal Halladay, but they were open to it, provided they could get top value, such as multiple blue-chip prospects, in return. Dealing Halladay with a year and a half left on his contract would fetch the Jays a higher price than hanging on to him for another year, and it would be better than risking just draft-pick compensation if he walked away to free agency after the 2010 season.
In 2009, Ruben Amaro Jr. was in his first year as Phillies general manager. The Phils were coming off a World Series championship in 2008 and had the lineup to get back to the World Series in 2009, but the starting pitching was suspect. Cole Hamels was having trouble duplicating his great work from the previous October and Brett Myers had been injured. The team scouted and eventually signed veteran Pedro Martinez, but he wasn’t the guy Amaro really wanted. Amaro had long ago become obsessed with the tall right-handed ace of the Toronto Blue Jays. The Phillies and Jays train just five miles apart in neighboring Florida towns. Amaro had seen enough of Roy Halladay to know if
he ever had the chance to get him, he would go for it.
“As far back as ’08, they were eyeing Halladay,” one team insider said of Amaro and his predecessor, Pat Gillick. “They knew he was going to be a free agent after 2010. For a long time, Roy was Ruben’s white whale.”
J. P. Ricciardi knew this. He was Toronto’s GM from late 2001 to 2009, and a smart, young, wisecracking baseball executive, much like Amaro. Early in the 2009 season, Amaro told Ricciardi, “If you ever do anything with Doc. . . .”
“I’ll let you know,” Ricciardi said.
On July 6, 2009, Ricciardi called Amaro and said he was ready to start taking offers for Halladay.
A day later, Ricciardi told Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports that Halladay was available—for the right price. Rosenthal posted a story on FOX’s Website. He nearly broke the Internet.
Ricciardi was contacted by a Philadelphia writer asking what it would take for the Phillies to get Halladay.
“The type of talent that makes you stand up and take notice,” Ricciardi said. “All the clubs that have contacted us understand that.”
Ricciardi added that if no team met his steep price, he’d hang on to the best pitcher in baseball.
“It’s going to take a lot,” he said. “Someone is going to have to have the stomach for this and I’m not sure anyone does.”
On the executive level of Citizens Bank Park, Amaro went into action. Advisers Gillick and Dallas Green urged him to go get Halladay.
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