Read Online The Rotation by Jim Salisbury - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œI 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.’
    â€œOne 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.
    While Dorfman had helped Halladay build the right mind-set to succeed in the majors, Queen had helped him build a delivery and pitch repertoire that would work.
    Queen, who pitched in the majors from 1964–72, was a longtime Jays’ pitching instructor. He got hold of Halladay when the Jays sent him from Dunedin to Double-A Knoxville early in the 2001 season. The first thing Queen did was berate Halladay. He told the pitcher he was soft. He called him a wimp. He gave him the old you’re-too-good-for-this lecture while questioning his manhood the whole way.
    â€œHe kicked me in the ass,” Halladay said after Queen’s death. “He challenged me. I think sometimes you need that. You need the honesty.”
    Once Queen got the old-school, drill-sergeant stuff out of the way, he went to work on the delivery. He killed Iron Mike, that straight-up-and-down delivery that allowed hitters a good look at the ball. He taught Halladay to start his delivery with a slight step back from the rubber to create some north-south momentum toward home plate. He junked the over-the-top release point and lowered Halladay’s arm angle to about three-quarters. That and a couple of new grips added movement—sinking and cutting action—to
Halladay’s straight fastball, making it more difficult to hit. A little shoulder tuck was added to hide the ball.
    Halladay worked on these adjustments for two weeks in the bullpen, with Queen often breathing fire down his neck.
    â€œAfter fifteen days I was able to take it all out in a game,” Halladay said. “It was night and day.”
    The deaths of Dorfman and Queen, and Campbell three years earlier, touched Halladay deeply.
    â€œThis makes you step back and realize how many influential people you’ve had in your career, and how many people you really owe a lot of credit and gratitude to,” he said in May 2011. “You obviously can’t do it by yourself. Things like that kind of bring that to the forefront.”
    It’s typical of Halladay to share credit. Heck, this is the guy who didn’t leave out anyone, not even the batboy, when he bought $4,000 gift watches for his teammates and others after his May 2010 perfect game. But everyone from Gord Ash, the man who came up with the plan for Halladay to start over at square one, to Buck Martinez, Toronto’s manager at the time, say the credit begins and ends with one person—Roy Halladay.
    â€œRoy did the work,” Martinez said. “He deserves all the credit. He could have flipped us off and told us to go to hell. He could have said, ‘I’ll go down, but I’m not going to do anything.’ But to his credit, he made a commitment. He went from being a borderline failure, Number One pick, maybe out of