An amazing day for a guy who cracked up so bad in his second season in the league that he looked to be another Rick Ankiel - 10.64 era and a banishment to the minors later, he has returned as one of the most quietly dominant pitchers of the last decade.
An amazing day for a guy who cracked up so bad in his second season in the league that he looked to be another Rick Ankiel - 10.64 era and a banishment to the minors later, he has returned as one of the most quietly dominant pitchers of the last decade.The funny thing of that 10.64 ERA season is that Halladay even then was throwing strikes. He only had a couple of games in which half or less of his pitches were strikes. The trouble seemed to be that he was making the strikes too good. He seems to have learned in that minor league banishment how to correct that problem and, though it took him the rest of the major league season to apply it consistently, that was just about the last time you could call him a case of raw talent with ordinary-to-appalling results.