IF ALL PITCHERS COULD BE PLAYING HALLADAYS: WHY DOC'S TOO GOOD TO PITCH A NO-HITTER

(Originally posted earlier July 26.)

This is what it's like to be a Blue Jays fan when Roy Halladay is pitching.

You know what to expect -- something like last night, when he gave up his usual two earned runs over seven innings with only one walk and six strikeouts as the Jays mauled the Seattle Mariners 12-3. For 85% of the starting pitchers in the majors, that's a notable performance; for Doc, it's more or less expected.

It's almost a letdown when he does exactly what you expect, since when he's on, you realize that good as Doc is, he seems unlikely to have one of those games that fans talk about for years, like pitching a no-hitter or striking out 20 guys.

You've heard of a pitcher having no-hitter stuff? It happens, once in a while. Halladay's consistency, though, almost works against such rare accidents. He's the quintessential power pitcher who will throw the ball over the plate, since he realizes many batters aren't up to hitting the ball with much authority.

It's one thing to be the type of power pitcher that, going across the generations, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson have been. Halladay belongs to a different subspecies of power pitcher, the Robin Roberts or Fergie Jenkins type who gets his fair share of strikeouts and hardly ever walks anyone but does surrender a fair number of gopher balls (12 in 150 innings this year).

Clemens, Ryan, et al., had once-in-a-generation arms; Halladay is exceptional but not quite in that company, which makes him more compelling to watch since he really has to work smart.

That works against him throwing a no-hitter, since there are always going to be more balls in play than there are with the classic blow-'em-away guys. Just contrast him with Ryan's season from 1977, the summer that Halladay was born.

Ryan threw 299 innings that year and had a whopping 566 batters faced who didn't put the ball in play: 204 walks, nine hit batsmen and 12 homers allowed to go with 341 strikeouts. That's 17 batters per nine innings pitched who didn't hit anything that Ryan's teammates had to field. Ryan's record that year: 19-16.

Contrast that with Halladay this season: 19 walks, four hit batters and those 12 homers across 150 innings, for 119 batters who didn't put the ball in play . That's only seven per nine innings pitched. Halladay's record this season: 13-2.

In other words, he lets the guys behind him do the work. Not terribly sexy stuff, but it gets the job done. It's about as far as you can get from the night a few years ago when the Jays No. 2 starter, A.J. Burnett, then with the Florida Marlins, no-hit the San Diego Padres while giving up nine walks.

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If all the pitchers played like Halladay, the sport would be as tedious as to work, since his idea of dominance is to get weak ground-ball outs and work so quickly that fans must often wonder how it was that two innings went by during their last beer run. Halladay thrives by throwing pitches that are hittable but not too hittable. If someone's going to a hit a home run off him -- and he realizes it will happen -- he makes sure it happens with nobody on base and/or the Jays already ahead.

He still has a high strikeout rate, but since he's not really interested in piling up Clemens or Randy Johnson-esque totals, so something on the order of a 20-whiff night is out. As for the no-hitter (in his second major-league start on the final day of the '98 season, Halladay lost a no-hit bid when Detroit's Bobby Higginson hit a pinch homer with two out in the ninth inning), it seems there's always going to be a ground ball single or a solo homer mixed in there somewhere.
There's no flash with Halladay. He just upsets hitters' timing in that banal way of his, ground ball after ground ball, with the odd hit squeaking through. Maybe that's keeping him from getting the name recognition of some of the other top pitchers, or why one wire-service account of last night's game actually contained three different spellings of his last name.

Still, he's almost never ineffective, and in a game where pitching has to be an immutable, Jays fans will take that.

That's all for now. Talk to you a little later. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.