LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Not long after the 2009 season ended, Toronto Blue Jays president Paul Beeston visited Roy Halladay to discuss the pitcher’s future. Then rookie GM Alex Anthopoulos was supposed to go, too, but got sick and missed the chance to make one final appeal for the ace to stay.
Not that it would have mattered.
“We had really decided, and really we had decided where we wanted to go,” Halladay recalled Monday, shortly after re-signing with the Blue Jays in order to retire as a member of the team that drafted and developed him. “It was a very tough decision but I felt like you never know how long you’re going to be able to play, and I really wanted to give myself a chance (to play in the post-season) at that point.
“They were so great to allow me to go out and have those experiences, and that meant so much to me.”
His gratitude to the organization– not only for trading him to the Philadelphia Phillies on Dec. 16, 2009, but also for helping him become arguably the generation’s best pitcher – is why he felt “fortunate” to retire as a member of the Blue Jays.
Halladay phoned Anthopoulos a couple of weeks ago, told them what he wanted to do, and asked if they’d be open to the idea.
“We were thrilled,” said Anthopoulos, helping set the stage for a brief but fitting reunification with a franchise giant, arguably the best homegrown player the team has ever produced.
Monday’s touching announcement – Halladay welled up a few times, a stunning visual juxtaposed with his near-robotic determination on the mound – helped stir memories of a parting that remains raw with some Blue Jays fans.
The seeds of his departure started following the 2008 season, with key starters Dustin McGowan and Shaun Marcum having suffered long-term injuries during the season and A.J. Burnett on the verge of opting out of his contract, a move that led to a new deal with the New York Yankees.
Halladay and then GM J.P. Ricciardi spoke about a possible trade before the season – the Blue Jays weren’t interested in moving him at the time – and when the team fell into a tailspin in late May of the 2009 season, he was publicly shopped before the trade deadline.
No trade was consummated, Ricciardi was fired on the penultimate day of the season and Anthopoulos swung the deal with the Phillies that fetched Kyle Drabek, Travis d’Arnaud (who helped land R.A. Dickey) and Michael Taylor (who became Brett Wallace, who became Anthony Gose).
“They were always completely upfront and honest with me, and I always respected the way they handled themselves,” Halladay said of the trade frenzy around him in the summer of 2009. “It’s definitely at times a business, but I never felt that way with the Blue Jays. They were family to me.”
The retirement comes with Halladay’s body no longer physically able to withstand the rigours of pitching – at least not up to his lofty standards.
While he underwent shoulder surgery last May the real culprit, he revealed Monday, was an ailing back that included “two pars fractures, an eroded disk between the L 4, and L 5,” and “a significant setback in there to where the nerves are being pinched.”
“Really,” he added, “it’s just made it hard to pitch with the mechanics I want to pitch with.”
In turn, that led to the shoulder issues that limited him to three batters faced and a top speed of 83 m.p.h. in the final start of his career, last Sept. 23 at Miami. The shoulder feels fine now, he says, but his back needs some work.
“Speaking with doctors, they feel like at this point, if I can step away and take some of that high level pressure off of it, it will hopefully allow me to do some regular things and help out with the kids’ (baseball) teams,” he said. “I want to be active. I want to continue to do things I enjoy doing, spend time with my family. The biggest thing is I’m trying to avoid surgery. They feel like we can address a lot of things by injections, by physical therapy. But we’re trying to avoid having to fuse. That will just lead to more issues down the road. So that is one of the big things we’re trying to avoid.”
Aside from coaching the teams his two sons play on, Halladay and the Blue Jays have discussed some type of role with the club. He could end up in spring training in some capacity and there may be some trial and error in finding a job that fits him best, but it sounds more like a matter of when rather than if.
“I do think at some point Roy is going to be part of the organization when he has time,” said Anthopoulos.
Halladay’s numbers are stunning by today’s standards and it’s hard to imagine him not being a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer in five years. He made 390 career starts and finished 67 of them – a 17 per cent rate that’s the stuff of fantasy now. He threw 2,749.1 innings and between 2002 and 2011, he threw at least 220 innings eight times, topping out at 266 in his Cy Young campaign of 2003 with the Blue Jays.
With the Phillies he won the Cy Young again in 2010, when he made his first post-season appearance and recorded one of the signature moments in his career – a no-hitter against the Cincinnati Reds in the 2010 NLDS. Even more impressive is that he’d already thrown a perfect game against the Marlins on May 29 of that year.
Halladay and the Phillies were bounced from the playoffs by the San Francisco Giants that season and lost in five games to the St. Louis Cardinals in the first round of 2011, failing to win the World Series he so dearly coveted.
“Hopefully down the road I can be a part of it in a different aspect,” said Halladay. “It’s something I definitely wanted, but having the chance to be in the playoffs to experience the atmosphere, I am more comfortable knowing I came up a little bit short than having never gotten that shot.”
A first-round pick, 17th overall, in the 1995 draft, Halladay flashed his brilliance in his second career big-league outing, a 2-1 win over the Detroit Tigers on Sept. 27, 1998, when he lost a no-hitter with two out in the ninth inning on a Bobby Higginson home run.
His ascension to stardom was derailed by struggles so severe in 2000 and early 2001 that the Blue Jays sent him all the way down to single-A, where pitching guru Mel Queen rebuilt his delivery and mental approach to the game.
Halladay returned midway through the 2001 season and never looked back.
“That’s really where I felt like my career changed was I started thinking I’m going to go out and do everything I possibly can,” explained Halladay. “If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, I can walk away knowing that I poured everything I had into it.
“I was very fortunate to have that experience because that stuck with me my entire career. It was something that was always a reminder in the back of my head, that if I go out there and don’t give everything I have and don’t pour everything into it, I could find myself in that exact same situation in a heartbeat.”
In his Cy Young season of 2003, he made 36 starts and threw 266 innings, winning his 22nd game on the final day of the season, a 5-4 complete-game over the Cleveland Indians. That season he also threw a 10-inning, three-hit shutout of the Tigers, won 1-0 on Bobby Kielty’s walk-off single.
On April 13, 2007 Halladay again threw 10 innings against the Tigers, winning this one 2-1 on an Alex Rios sacrifice fly. Fernando Rodney took the loss both times.
Still, as good as Halladay was during his time in Toronto, the shame for the Blue Jays is that they never made more of his peak years, unable to reach the post-season with him as their ace.
Eventually he’ll join Carlos Delgado on the club’s Level of Excellence as the only players to be so honoured not to make the playoffs in Toronto, and even sadder is that no one since has put himself on track for similar recognition.
Given how great Halladay was it’s too easy, too tempting to wonder what might have been. At least his career ends back with the Blue Jays, the place where he belonged all along.