The Rotation (7 page)

Halladay's ERA in 2000 was 10.64, the highest single-season mark for a pitcher with 50 or more big-league innings. Ash knew he wasn't going to get great value for Halladay in a trade after a season like that, and he damn well knew he wasn't going to release a 23-year-old with an arm like that, even if scouts sometimes derisively referred to Halladay as “Iron Mike” because his upright stance, over-the-top delivery and straight fastball resembled one of those old metal-armed pitching machines that hitters used for batting practice.

“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 more 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.