Many words have been written about Roy Halladay and his bummer of a spring. But it was a line from CSN's Jim Salisbury, not surprisingly, in a piece yesterday examining Doc's first start tonight that we thought captured the situation rather well.
Halladay’s transition from pitching wizard to muggle began last season
when he was plagued by injury, a flagging fastball and ineffectiveness.
I had to copy, paste, and Google that one. From Wikipedia:
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In the fictional world of J. K. Rowling's book series Harry Potter, a muggle
is a person who lacks any sort of magical ability and was not born into
the magical world. Muggles also do not have any magical blood. It
differs from the term Squib,
which refers to a person with one or more magical parents yet without
any magical ability, and from the term Muggle-born (or the more
offensive mudblood), which refers to a person with magical abilities but without magical parents.
Now, tonight's start is clearly a big one in terms of building initial confidence in your favorite baseball team. But let's not forget Halladay is still basically finishing up his spring training. After that pesky virus set him back last month, he never really got in all of the work he seemingly would have liked to in order to be where he wanted to for his first regular season start. So tonight is not Roy at the top of his game now, whatever that may be. At least he says he feels good, though.
Halladay was just okay in his final spring tune up. Not very good, but not awful. If he puts in even a solid performance tonight, I think it should be viewed as encouraging. A win tonight would be the 200th of his career.
His decline seems to be one of those sad realities that fans are just going to have to stomach. The days of bloggers and penguins freaking out (in a good and glorious way) every fifth day when Doc is set to pitch are over. No more photoshops of Roy as half man, half machine.
But I'm not giving up on the guy just yet. Surely there's still some magic hidden somewhere up the sleeve of his throwing arm?
Tonight is just one outing, but it's likely going to have a huge bearing on how many people are going to feel about this Phillies season.
>>Anxiety, uncertainty surround Halladay's first start [CSN]