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Everything that is good, just and righteous prevailed Tuesday when Roy Halladay won the Cy Young Award.
To no surprise — a perfect 32 first place votes — his masterful inaugural season in Philadelphia was crowned with the highest honor a pitcher can receive.
Too bad that’s all we could do for the guy. He will be the first to say a championship takes precedent over individual accolades. True enough, but even he should take time off from the presumably excruciating off-season regimen to soak this one in.
It was truly a remarkable campaign, as unanimous as the definition allows — Halladay was the best pitcher in a year bannered by excellence on the mound.
When the award was announced, I checked his numbers. Twenty-one wins at the end of the season, Halladay sputtered out of the gate by his standards to a 9-7 first half of the season. To atone, he finished 13-3, pushing him to 21-10 on the year.
Normally double-digit loss totals would be glaring, even if a pitcher racked up victories; with Halladay, it verifies his best asset as a pitcher. Even if he is struggling with command or trailing in games, he remains the team’s best option to record outs in the opponent’s lineup.
Every fifth day, the Phillies bullpen sleeps in an extra hour, doesn’t shower, slugs a six-pack and if it’s a night game, eats dessert, knowing “Doc” has this one. He was only one of two pitchers with 30 decisions in 2010 and quietly led the league with nine complete games and 250.2 innings pitched. He registered 219 strikeouts and notched a 2.44 ERA, but trumping both those stats is his walk total: 30 in 33 starts.
With the 17th pick in the 1995 draft, the Toronto Blue Jays selected the 18-year-old right-hander out of Denver. Three years later, in only his second start, Halladay foreshadowed the career he was destined for. In his second career start, Halladay pitched eight and two-thirds innings of no-hit baseball. With two outs in the ninth, he surrendered a solo home run, but the promising young starter retired the next batter and did what has become routine for him — notch a complete game victory.
The one-hit dandy was the type of pitching performance a young player can build his career upon; but like so many promising pitching prospects, Halladay’s flair fizzled in only his second full season. A 10.64 ERA in 13 starts in 2000 gave the Blue Jay front office no choice but to designate him for assignment to Single A ball. His assignment was to recreate himself as a pitcher — working on the technical aspects of the craft like keeping the ball down in the zone, getting ahead in counts, trusting his breaking ball and prioritizing the location of his pitches. All of these traits are present in a Roy Halladay-pitched game, and it’s what makes him so efficient and commanding.
His arrival year finally came in 2002. With a 19-7 record and an ERA below 3.0 (2.93), it was clear that whatever issues he brought with him to the minor leagues stayed there. The next season he topped that with a 22-7 record and his first career Cy Young. It was his first time — besides this year — in which his walk total was lower than the number of games he started — an accomplishment that merits the superlative “most impressive” amongst his wins, ERA, innings pitched and strikeouts any Hall of Fame resume would envy.
To beat Roy Halladay, you have to go to work and grind every pitch because of his refusal to give pitches away.
His tenure in Toronto was marked by a glaring lack of run support. The stat lines from his days there share a common similarity: low ERA and low win totals. Finally, as an apologetic reward for his services and their incompetence, the Blue Jays traded Halladay to a contender after the 2009 season.
The inevitable finally came in his first season in Philadelphia. In June the man known as “Doc” finally threw a perfect game. It seemed a foregone conclusion that the day would come.
The Phils reached the playoffs and for the first time since entering the majors, Halladay had the opportunity to experience what it was like to pitch in the post-season. Not shocking to anybody was that Halladay’s performance completely shadowed the toil of the moment. He threw a no-hitter — only the second one in playoff history.
When it comes to his success, Halladay’s consistency comes from his durability. Since 2002, his first season upon returning from the minors, he has made at least 30 starts in every season except two. A stretch of injuries spanning the 2004-05 seasons limited him to only 40 starts in those two seasons combined (still a very respectable 20 starts per year). Over the years, countless pitchers have burst on the scene and flamed out before we could even appreciate them. Recent examples are Dontrelle Willis and Mark Prior. Doing it year in and year out is what makes a Hall of Famer.
Not only is Halladay the best pitcher of the current generation, he will go down as one of the best of all time when he retires. At 33 years old, and with no nagging injuries to speak of, it can be said that his efficient style of pitching will yield six or seven more years of top-tier pitching from his right arm. Now that he is finally on a contending team, his career win total could possibly tease the 300 mark, a milestone some people say will never be reached again by any pitcher. But it doesn’t do him justice to look at the numbers. They aren’t what he is about.
Bangor Daily News