Phils Lose To Mets; What They’re Saying About Roy Halladay

Remember when Roy Halladay was the best pitcher of his generation? Nope? It wasn’t easy to discern on Monday when he gave up seven runs over four innings in a 7-2 loss to the hated Mets.

The Inquirer reports:

Halladay spoke for 15 minutes afterward as his catharsis. He cannot command a baseball. He is not injured or upset with his pitching mechanics. He estimated “95 percent” of his issues stem from mental pressure.

He told an anecdote from his mentor, the psychologist Harvey Dorfman. If you’re trying to catch a bird, Dorfman said, you flail when you attempt to grab it.

“You have to hold your hands out and let it land in your hands,” Halladay said. “It’s the same way with pitching.”

The 700 Level proclaims it “worrying time“:

I don’t pretend to know the answers. I just know what everybody else now knows–that the guy wearing #34 for the Fightins tonight was not the guy who threw a no-hitter in his first-ever post-season start, who perfecto’d the Marlins on a late Saturday afternoon in May, who averaged 20 wins a game over his first two seasons in Philadelphia and seemed a safe pencil-in for about that many more every year he took the mound in the Red and White. And I have no idea what the Phillies are going to do without him.

Bob Brookover wonders if Halladay’s glory days are over:

The Phillies’ dilemma, of course, is that Halladay keeps saying he is healthy, improving and capable of making adjustments. You can’t blame the Phillies for wanting to believe him, especially when they owe him $20 million this season.

Given his stature and dedication, they owe him a few more starts to see if he can somehow figure out how to become a competent pitcher again. It sure appears as if his days of being an elite ace have passed him by just like the high school kid with the powerful arm in the Springsteen song.

The New York Times says Halladay has lost his touch:

Halladay’s decline is a sensitive topic around the Phillies, whose plan for another championship around a collection of aces seems unlikely to happen. Since winning the title in 2008, the Phillies have, in successive seasons, lost the World Series, the National League Championship Series and a division series, before last year’s .500 finish.

For the trend line to tilt upward again, the Phillies need Halladay to be close to the pitcher who dominated with biting cutters and sinkers that broke hard and late, inducing swings and misses or weak contact. He also had one of the game’s best curveballs and a fierce drive to continually outlast other starters.

And at ESPN, former Phillie Doug Glanville suggests that it’s all over for Halladay:

From what we know, that isn’t Roy Halladay. Halladay is the man who outworks you, who lifts weights just to simulate the gorilla that jumps on every starter’s back in the eighth inning. If the Doc slows down, he will still be better because he learned how to pitch and outwit hitters, to have so much movement that velocity becomes irrelevant. Yet we are finding that injury questions aside, he has a learning curve to ride out, and there is still an outside chance that he might not figure it out like so many others who sit in forced retirement.