The Rotation

by Jim Salisbury

  “Ruben has a chance to make history in this town if he gets this guy,” Green said at the time.

  All the usual contenders—the Yankees, Red Sox, Rangers, and Angels—called Ricciardi about Halladay.

  “I tried to get in it,”Yankees GM Brian Cashman said. “But Toronto told us to trade him in the division, it would have been twice the sticker price.”

  In many ways, Ricciardi’s talks with clubs other than the Phillies were hollow because Halladay had a no-trade clause and Philadelphia was the place he—and his family—wanted to go. Halladay admired the team’s roster and liked that it didn’t seem filled with egos. He believed the Phils knew how to win and could keep doing it.

  “There was just something about the Phillies for all of us,” Halladay said.

  Even the pitcher’s oldest son, Braden, wanted his dad to be a Phillie.

  “He didn’t like New York or Boston because we always got beat up by them,” Halladay said with a laugh in the summer of 2011. “So I think that turned him off a little.”

  Focusing on the Phillies as the July 31, 2009 trade deadline approached, Ricciardi sent his most trusted aides to watch the Phils’ top minor-league prospects.

  Finally, as Halladay prepared for what many thought would be his final start as a Blue Jay in Toronto on July 24, Ricciardi prepared his wish list. He wanted outfield prospects Domonic Brown and Anthony Gose, pitching prospect Kyle Drabek, and left-hander J. A. Happ.

  Amaro almost gagged on that price tag.

  “I couldn’t give up my top position prospect [Brown] and my top pitching prospect [Drabek],” he said later.

  Halladay made that start on July 24 in Toronto. “We love you, Roy,” shouted one fan, sensing that Halladay would soon be dealt. Phillies scout Charley Kerfeld popped in for the game just to make sure Halladay got on and off the mound healthy. The talks went on with the Phillies trying to build a deal around a package that included catcher Lou Marson, infielder Jason Donald, pitcher Jason Knapp, and Happ. In some variations of the deal, the Phils may have been willing to include Drabek, but the Jays wanted more. Ricciardi’s job was on the line and he needed to make a big score for Halladay.

  “To quote Sonny Corleone, ‘I’ve got to come out of this with more than just my you-know-what in my hand,’ ” Ricciardi said the day after Halladay’s July 24 start in Toronto.

  Ricciardi used his best sales pitch on Amaro.

  “Ruben,” Ricciardi told Amaro over the phone. “You make this deal and you’ll be like Caesar riding through the streets of Philly after he just conquered the Gauls.”

  In another conversation, Ricciardi mentioned a famous Clearwater eatery in his appeal for the Phillies’ top prospects.

  “Ruben, we’re talking about prospects here,” he said. “In three years, they’ll be serving me my breakfast at Lenny’s.”

  Even as he pursued his obsession, Amaro kept other options open. He needed starting pitching and he couldn’t limit his focus to one guy. In Cleveland, the Indians had put a “for sale” sign on Cliff Lee, and though he didn’t wear the “best pitcher in baseball” label, he had won a Cy Young Award and Phillies officials liked him. The Phillies’ front office juggled two pursuits—Halladay and Lee—as the deadline approached. On the morning of July 29, Halladay rose in his Seattle hotel room, thinking that this indeed might be the day he made his last start for the Jays. Talks between the Phillies and Jays had reached a point where the deal was going to get done or it wasn’t.

  “We’re going to get one of them,” a Phillies official said that morning, referring to Halladay or Lee.

  A short while later, reporters who had followed the Jays to Seattle in anticipation of a Halladay trade, read Internet reports that Cliff Lee was hugging Cleveland teammates in the visiting dugout in Anaheim. He had been traded to the Phillies. Halladay was crestfallen. He knew he was stuck in Toronto. He knew another postseason would go on without him. His biological clock was ticking and he wondered if he’d ever get to pitch in a postseason. On top of it all, he had to go out and pitch a game against the Mariners. In one of the most difficult starts of his life, he lost, 3-2, in unusually stifling Seattle heat. After the game, Halladay appeared drained and anguished. He disappeared to a back room in the clubhouse for a while. Most of his teammates had already boarded a bus for the airport when he emerged to speak with reporters.

  “When all was said and done it had to be the right situation for Toronto,” Halladay said that day. “That wasn’t the case. I’m a Blue Jay and I’m happy to be one.”

  Only half of that last statement was true.

  “I liked being where I was, but I was ready to go somewhere where we had a chance,” said Halladay, looking back at that day two years later. “Going through that month with nothing happening—it kind of sucks it all out of you. It was disappointing, but at the same time, a weight was gone.”

  Halladay finished speaking with reporters that day in Seattle and headed for the bus. Possibly the worst part of his day was about to come. The Jays were headed for a series against the A’s in Oakland. They would be staying at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, the same hotel where the Phillies were staying for a concurrent series with the Giants. Down the street, in an equipment trunk in the visiting clubhouse at AT&T Park, was a Phillies jersey with Halladay’s name and No. 34 on it. It stayed buried at the bottom of the trunk. Lee showed up and was issued No. 34. Halladay’s long July drama was over. All he wanted to do when he got to the St. Francis was lock his door and get away from it all.

  During his dozen years in Toronto, Halladay had five top-five seasons in both ERA and AL Cy Young voting (winning the award once). He had a pair of 20-win seasons and three times led the league in innings. Once a skittish impala in a land of lions, he had become the king of the jungle with an assassin’s mentality that matched a razor-sharp arsenal of pitches.

  “He understands the dynamics of pitching,” Buck Martinez said. “He puts pressure on the hitter and makes them uncomfortable from the first pitch of the game because he throws strikes. But he’s not throwing it over the middle of the plate. He knows what inch he wants to hit. He cuts the ball and sinks the ball and changes speeds. There are guys with better stuff, but Halladay’s strength is he’s got his foot on your throat the whole game. Body language means so much and his says, I’m better than you.”

  Of course, Halladay would never verbalize that. Others have to say it.

  “I’ll tell you what, he’s the best pitcher I’ve ever faced,” said Jerry Hairston Jr., who finished his fourteenth big-league season in 2011. “And I’ve faced a lot of guys. As a hitter, you hate to give a guy credit like that. But it’s true. You just never know what he’s going to throw.”

  Halladay never reached the postseason in 12 seasons in Toronto. Each October, he’d go home and watch other teams try to get to the World Series. With each passing year, Halladay’s desperation to reach the Series grew stronger. He thought he might have a chance to get there in 2009, but instead watched Cliff Lee get there—wearing the No. 34 Phillies uniform that had once been reserved for him.

  “Turn that darn TV off!” Brandy Halladay told her husband as he watched the Phillies and Yankees play in the 2009 World Series.

  “I had to turn my face,” Brandy added a couple of months later. “It was tough to watch.”

  But as difficult as it was to watch another World Series without her husband even getting a smell of it, July 2009 was tougher on the Halladays.

  “We had never been the subject of trade discussion before and all of a sudden it was everywhere,” Brandy said. “You figured, ‘It’s got to happen.’ When it didn’t, it was very disappointing. It was hard for Roy to go back and do his job. That uproar taxed us. It was difficult.”

  Brandy Halladay said her husband wasn’t just disappointed that another pennant race would go by without him. He was disappointed that he wasn’t going to be a Phillie.

  “It was one hundred and ten percent about the Phillies,” she sa
id. ‘‘We really thought we were coming here. This is where we wanted to be.”

  The Phillies lost that World Series in six games to the Yankees. A week later, Amaro packed his suitcase for the annual general managers’ meetings in Chicago. It was time to start building the 2010 Phillies.

  Even though he had landed Lee in July, Amaro’s lust for Halladay had not dulled. Alex Anthopoulos had moved up from an assistant’s post and replaced J. P. Ricciardi as Toronto’s GM. Amaro was headed up to his room at the O’Hare Hilton when he and Anthopoulos crossed paths near an elevator bank.

  “We’d still like to talk about Halladay if you’re going to move him,” Amaro told Anthopoulos, who was all ears and eager to talk.

  The next morning, a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer proclaimed that the Phillies were still angling to get Halladay. Later that afternoon, Amaro shot down the report, even though he knew it was true.

  A month later, Amaro and his lieutenants headed for the winter meetings in Indianapolis. They were juggling two pretty big balls in the air, talking with Lee’s representative about a contract extension—the pitcher’s deal was set to expire after 2010—and with the Jays (secretly) about a trade for Halladay. While talks of an extension with Lee proved difficult, dealings with the Jays were smooth. The Jays had resolved to give Halladay his wish, and the Phillies, encouraged by the development of some of their young right-handed pitching prospects, were ready to include Drabek in the deal. The Phillies would not do the deal without signing Halladay to a contract extension. They also required a physical exam with their own doctors.

  A few days after the winter meetings, Greg Landry, Halladay’s agent, was home in Louisiana shopping for goodies for his son Cooper’s third birthday party when his cell phone rang. It was Anthopoulos. The Jays and Phillies had reached a tentative agreement on a trade.

  “We were having twenty-five kids over that day,” Landry recalled. “I got the call and rushed home and told my wife, ‘Roy just got traded. We’re getting seventy-two hours to negotiate a deal. I have to go to Philly.’ ”

  Landry’s wife was OK with his missing the birthday party. Halladay felt horrible about it. He and Landry had been together since Halladay was drafted. Their families are close.

  “Roy,” Landry told his client. “Don’t worry about it. When my son is older he’ll say my dad couldn’t stay for my third birthday because he had to help Roy Halladay negotiate a deal with the Phillies. Trust me, Roy, this is a good thing.”

  It was a real good thing. Halladay passed his physical and agreed to a long-term extension. Amaro netted his white whale. And Phillies fans rejoiced—at least briefly.They were dumbfounded when the Phillies announced that they had dealt Lee to Seattle in a companion move. It was a trade the Phillies ultimately regretted. By mid-season 2010 they were trying to get Lee back from Seattle. The Phils never regretted getting Halladay. He couldn’t stop beaming at his introductory news conference on December 16, 2009.

  “This is the place I want to be,” said Halladay, finally pulling on the No. 34 jersey that Lee had kept warm. “I was holding out hope and trying to be as optimistic as possible that I’d end up here, and it happened.”

  Halladay’s first season with the Phillies was almost storybook. He pitched the 20th perfect game in major-league history in May. In September, he wiped champagne from his eyes after pitching a shutout to clinch the NL East title and ensure his first-ever trip to the postseason. Eight days later, he pitched the first postseason no-hitter in 54 years, blanking the Cincinnati Reds in front of a delirious crowd at Citizens Bank Park.

  Martinez, the guy who all those years earlier had tipped off Halladay about the Blue Jays’ plans to send him to the minors, watched that game on television.

  “I was so happy for him,” Martinez said. “That no-hitter was everything Roy had pined for—a good team, the postseason, the big stage, and excellence.”

  Actually, it wasn’t everything that Halladay had pined for. The 2010 Phillies lost to San Francisco in the NL Championship Series. Halladay reported to spring training in 2011 still looking to fulfill his biggest career desire, the goal that drove him to Philadelphia in the first place—a World Series championship.

  ROY OSWALT

  The HomePlate Fish & Steakhouse just outside of rural Weir, Mississippi, served a popular fish buffet and a 44-ounce steak in honor of its owner.

  It sat on land Roy Oswalt purchased from a timber company and personally cleared with his Caterpillar D6N XL, a $230,000 bulldozer he received as a gift from Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane for winning Game 6 of the 2005 National League Championship Series. Oswalt used the 35,000-pound yellow monster to move earth and timber because he wanted people in Weir (pronounced “where”) to have a place to eat on the weekends.

  “I built it for the community,” he said.

  Folks had to drive at least 20 miles to the nearest restaurant before HomePlate opened in November 2009. But being the only restaurant in town hardly guaranteed success. There are only 550 people in Weir, where Oswalt grew up, and less than 9,000 in Choctaw County, where Weir is located. Restaurants had come and gone because folks trying to make a living running them could not make ends meet. Oswalt hoped to do just enough business to keep the place open.

  HomePlate had wood paneling, fluorescent lighting, and baseball memorabilia on the walls. There was no wine list or beer selection. (Choctaw County is a dry county, which was fine with Oswalt because he lived down the road and did not want to worry about drunk drivers so close to home.) The food was affordable and business was good. It served dinner from 4 P.M. to 9 P.M. on Fridays and Saturdays—folks in Weir eat at home during the week, so it was closed weeknights—and fared well enough early on to eventually open for lunch on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

  But as the economy soured, the restaurant struggled.

  HomePlate closed in the summer of 2011.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Oswalt said. “I may reopen it. I don’t know. It’s kind of sad.”

  Professional baseball players often relocate to Florida, Arizona, or California once they get a few bucks in their pockets because of the weather and training opportunities in the off-season. But Oswalt never dreamed of leaving Mississippi. It is where he grew up, it is where he will retire, and it is where he will be buried.

  “It’s home,” he said. “Everyone knows you as you, not for what you do. That’s what I like about it. Every once in awhile somebody gets excited about what I do, but most everybody is like, ‘That’s Roy. He’s on his tractor, pushing something. He’s no big deal.’ ”

  Oswalt has a deep connection with Weir, where he learned about life, work ethic, and baseball. His grandfather, Houston Oswalt, was a logger, until he retired at 78. But retirement means different things to different people and Houston did not retire to the golf course or front porch to play backgammon with the neighbors.

  He started a 20-acre watermelon farm.

  “He did it for us more than anything to make us work,” Oswalt said.

  Houston had Roy and Roy’s older brother, Brian, get to work every morning at dawn.The two boys always thought they would finish in time to go fishing, but that rarely happened.They instead spent the entire day fertilizing and hoeing the fields. One day Roy and Brian decided to sleep in. At around 7:30 A.M. their grandfather rolled up to the house and rustled them out of bed.

  “Hurry up and get your clothes on,” Houston said. “You’re all late. We’re going to have to make up the difference.”

  The boys got to sleep in a little, but also had their workday extended by an hour and a half.

  “It’d always take all day,” Oswalt said. “But that’s how we made our money to buy school clothes for the next year. It makes you appreciate the money part of [baseball] because we’d work all week for $300.”

  Eventually, Roy and Brian started working for their father, Billy, who ran a logging business. Brian ran the skidder, which grabbed the trees and dragged them onto a ramp.
Once on the ramp, Roy cut off the limbs and then worked the knuckleboom loader, which picked up the trees to be loaded onto the trucks. They started at five in the morning—fixing and sharpening the saws—and finished at five in the evening, although some days lasted longer as they drove two to three hours to the job site. And just like their days in the watermelon fields, they always imagined they would have enough energy to hang out with their friends afterward. But when Friday night came they were too tired to leave the house. They settled for Saturday nights out instead.

  “That’s when I decided I didn’t want to do logging,” Oswalt said. “It’s a lot of hours. It’s a lot of work.”

  Older brother Brian agreed. It was hard work, but they were fun times.

  “You wouldn’t say you miss it,” Brian said in the summer of 2011. “But me and Roy are both kind of like, ‘Life is going by real quick and you look back at things and miss certain things or aspects of it.’ It was slower then.”

  Roy always loved baseball and had the passion to play it. As a youngster he even pitched against his future wife, Nicole, in a youth-league game. Nicole went on to play college softball. Roy doesn’t remember what happened in that long ago at-bat, but the story still brings a smile to his face. As a teenager, Roy would finish work during the summer and jump onto the log truck for a ride home. Well, close to home. He would have to walk or hitchhike the remaining three miles. But once he got home he had plenty of energy for baseball. He would hop in his truck and make the drive wherever he was scheduled to pitch.

  “Are you ready to go?” his coach would ask him.

  “I’m ready,” he would reply.

  He pitched seven innings every time.

  Oswalt attended high school at Weir Attendance Center, which had no baseball team when he was a freshman. Billy Oswalt wanted to change that. He had watched his sons play baseball with success and petitioned the school board to add a baseball program. It said, sure, raise the money and build the field. The Oswalts and others raised the money needed to start the program. And on one Saturday, Billy and a couple of his employees at the logging company cleared about 60 trees for the field. It took him another couple days to flatten the land. His boys pitched in. The trees cleared were sold to raise money to complete the construction of the field.