Roy Halladay

Roy Halladay pitched his way to the bottom of the sport and then climbed back to the very top, a reinvention so complete that it became the story of his career. He led his league in complete games seven times, won a Cy Young Award in each league, and in one astonishing summer threw a perfect game and a postseason no-hitter. He worked harder than anyone around him and asked for nothing easy, and his life ended too soon in a plane crash at 40. The BBWAA elected him to the Hall of Fame in 2019, on the first ballot.

Doc

Halladay was born on May 14, 1977, in Denver, Colorado, and a Toronto broadcaster gave him the nickname Doc, after the gunfighter Doc Holliday. The Blue Jays drafted him 17th overall in 1995, and the talent arrived early, a heavy sinker and a pitcher's build and command that made him look ready. He nearly threw a no-hitter in one of his first major league starts, losing it with two outs in the ninth, and the future seemed to be laid out in front of him. Then it fell apart.

The Worst Season and the Rebuild

In 2000 Halladay posted a 10.64 earned run average, among the worst any pitcher has ever managed in a real stretch of starts, and the Blue Jays sent him all the way down to Class A to start over. He rebuilt everything, his mechanics and his mind both, working with the instructor Mel Queen, who lowered his arm slot to give hitters a worse look, and the sport psychologist Harvey Dorfman, who fixed how he thought on the mound. He came back a different pitcher, relentless and precise, and he turned the lowest point of his career into its foundation. The man who returned would not be sent down again.

The Workhorse

What set Halladay apart was a refusal to leave games he had started. He led his league in complete games seven times, the most of any pitcher whose career began after 1945, a throwback in an age of pitch counts and bullpens. He attacked the strike zone, worked fast, and treated nine innings as the job rather than the exception, and his training became the stuff of legend among teammates who could not keep his hours. He won the American League Cy Young Award in 2003, going 22-7, the ace of Toronto teams that were never quite good enough to reach October around him.

A Trade and a Perfect Game

After more than a decade of pitching brilliantly for teams that went nowhere, Halladay forced his way to a contender, traded to the Philadelphia Phillies before the 2010 season. He answered with the year of his life. On May 29, 2010, he threw a perfect game against the Marlins, the 20th in history, 27 up and 27 down. He won the National League Cy Young that fall, the fifth pitcher ever to win the award in both leagues, and he made an expansion-era dream come true at last, October baseball with a real team behind him.

No-Hitter in October

The postseason gave him the largest stage and he matched it. In his first career playoff start, Game 1 of the 2010 division series against Cincinnati, Halladay threw a no-hitter, only the second in the history of postseason baseball after Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956. He had now thrown two no-hitters in a single season, one of them perfect and one of them in October, a feat that belonged to no one else. The pitcher who had been demoted to Class A a decade earlier was now the best in the game on its biggest night.

The Decline and the Crash

The workload caught up with him, and back and shoulder trouble wore him down until he retired after the 2013 season, signing a one-day contract to leave as a Blue Jay. He finished with 203 wins, a 3.38 earned run average, and two Cy Young Awards, and he turned to flying, a passion he chased in retirement. On November 7, 2017, he died at 40 when the small amphibious plane he was piloting crashed into the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast. Investigators found that he had been performing aggressive low-altitude maneuvers while impaired by several substances, a sobering end that his family met openly, having spoken of his private struggles with candor.

Cooperstown Without a Logo

The writers elected Halladay to the Hall of Fame in 2019, on the first ballot with 85 percent of the vote, a posthumous honor accepted by his widow Brandy. The family asked that his plaque cap carry no team logo, declining to choose between the Blue Jays and the Phillies who had each shaped his career. "Roy is going in as a Major League Baseball player," Brandy said. The pitcher who had remade himself from the worst season imaginable went in as one of the finest of his time, his cap left blank for both the cities that claimed him.