Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Roy Halladay

The baseball world was stunned at the death of Roy Halladay in a plane crash at the age of 40 in his small aircraft.

I'm never surprised when I hear of passings from airplane accidents.
I'm amazed that they don't happen more often and when you think of the number of miles that professional teams (and even college teams to an extent) spend in the air, the small number of accidents that have occurred are pretty surprising.
It seems so often when these things happen that they are using one of the smaller aircraft and that was the case this time as well.

Halladay, who is thought by some to be an eventual hall of famer, spent the bulk of his career with the Toronto Blue Jays winning the 1993 Cy Young before finishing his career with the Phillies with the first two years being the highlights as Halladay would win the 2010 Cy Young and finishing second in 2011 Cy Young balloting.

Halladay won 20 games three times (Twice in Toronto and once in Philadelphia) over a dominant ten-year run that saw his ERA rise over three and a half just once over that run and lead his league in complete games eight times.
Halladay will be most remembered as a Blue Jay, but it was as a Phillie that he etched the plaque that was inscribed "Big Game Pitcher" with a perfect game in 2010 along with only the second no-hitter in post-game history against the Reds in the NLDS.

What I liked about Halladay as a pitcher was that he was a reminder of the pitchers that pitched during my glory days of following days- big strapping pitchers that took the ball every four days (five by the days of Halladay) and wasn't afraid to accumulate innings.
Halladay never reached double digits in complete games, but yet in an age that prized peak performance over grit and guile, Halladay ( and maybe Curt Schilling as well) were almost the last of the old school arms.

Halladay also was unusual in another fashion- Halladay struck out more in the latter half of his career than the beginning half, which is very unusual.
Of Halladay's five seasons of over 200 strikeouts, four of them came after the age of 30, so he truly did get better as he matured and he kept the ball inside the park too as he allowed less than a homer per nine innings for his career.

One other note on Halladay- he played in an era of the two teams that he played for making some of the dumbest uniform decisions that you can think of.
Halladay's tenure in Philadelphia came at a time when the Phillies were suddenly pushing blue as a color used as trim and on bills on their caps and it just looked awful.
The Toronto term was even worse as the Blue Jays scrapped their beautiful logo that they had used since entering the league (they have since returned to it)  for two of the worse logos that you can imagine and using black as the predominant color for a team called the BLUE Jays!
It wasn't easy to find a picture of Halladay in Toronto togs that weren't those ugly things.
It's too bad because what a player plays in is what we remember him in and Halladay sure caught some sartorial bad breaks.

I think Roy Halladay is of Hall of Fame consideration caliber.
He did squeak just over 200 wins (his 203 final total being reached in his injury-riddled last year that saw Halladay win just four games), but his big game performance and run dominance gives him a chance to hit Cooperstown.
Halladay's not a lock though as the comparison's I think of are Curt Schilling and Jack Morris, neither who have made the Hall yet and on Baseball References ten closest pitchers in similarity score, only one is a hall of famer in Dazzy Vance, who isn't the top name you would hope to see on such a list.
Halladay will have an edge in some of the advanced stats with the voters that favor those becoming more and more prevalent, so he does have that going for him in future ballots.
Halladay is eligible for election in 2019.




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