Iowa Cubs Manager Marty Pevey Remembers Roy Halladay

Being the manager of a baseball team can be a daunting task. The manager has to possess the ability to think on his feet, keep the players in his clubhouse loose and ready to play, all while trying to muster up a formidable lineup and perhaps the most difficult part of the job: managing his bullpen at the end of the game to secure a win for his team.

The manager's job becomes much easier when his starting pitcher goes deep into the game, and no one alleviated the stresses of his manager more than Roy "Doc" Halladay. The tall right-hander, who pitched 16 MLB seasons for Toronto and Philadelphia, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 40.
"Sixty-seven complete games is something we will never see again at the professional level," Iowa Cubs manager Marty Pevey said. "[Doc] made it an absolute point that when it was his turn in the rotation, he wanted to give the bullpen a day off."
Pevey managed in the Toronto Blue Jays minor leagues for nine seasons, serving two stints from 1996-98 and 2000-05, also serving as the major league club's bullpen coach in 1998 under Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson and 1999 under Jim Fregosi.
Pevey was the Blue Jays' bullpen coach when Halladay was promoted to the big leagues for the first time in 1998, and got to witness the rookie phenom twirl a one-run, one-hit complete game against the Detroit Tigers in just his second career MLB start on September 27, 1998.
"Doc was unbelievable in that start against Detroit," Pevey said. "He only gave up one hit in nine innings, an opposite field home run to Bobby Higginson, which I happened to catch in the bullpen."
But the storybook career of "Doc" Halladay didn't come without a few bumps in the road. After having big league success in his first two seasons with the Blue Jays from 1998-99, Halladay struggled out of the gates to begin the 2000 season. He made the big league roster but was demoted twice in May and July, finishing the season with a 10.64 ERA in 67.2 big league innings.
The Blue Jays sent Halladay to three different minor league affiliates between 2000-01 to work on his mechanics. One of those stops was Class-A Dunedin in the Florida State League, where Pevey was the manager at the time.
"[Halladay] had one of the worst spring trainings [in 2000] that I've ever seen," Pevey said. "He still had the stuff, but he had some mechanical things that he needed to work on."
At the time of his demotion to the minors, Halladay relied primarily on his strength to get batters out. After adjusting his arm angle and working on a more deceptive delivery in the minors, he went from Dunedin to Double-A Tennessee to Triple-A Syracuse, eventually making it back to the big league rotation by the middle of the 2001 season. Halladay never looked back from there, posting a 3.19 ERA in 16 starts for Toronto in 2001 that ignited a Hall of Fame-caliber major league pitching career.
Halladay would go on to become an eight-time MLB All-Star, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, pitching the 20th perfect game in MLB history and the second no-hitter in MLB postseason history.
"If [Doc] was your friend, you had a friend for life," Pevey said. "He will be missed and to me, Doc is absolutely a Hall of Famer."