November 17, 2010

Roy Halladay Wins National League Cy Young, Vote Unanimous: When Roy Halladay was named the winner of the N.L. Cy Young Award on Tuesday, he was golfing in Mexico with Mike Sweeney, Chris Carpenter, and Chris Young. Yes, even Halladay knows how to take a vacation and find a foursome somewhere. In a few weeks, Halladay will once again beat just about everyone to the Phillies' spring training complex. (After realizing this could be a problem, they gave the man his own key.) He has already begun an arm-strengthening program. All right, so vacation isn't all rest.


posted by tommytrump to baseball at 08:49 PM - 2 comments

He's so good there's really nothing to say :)

It will be interesting to see how long Halladay remains so good. He's working on a hall of fame career.

Halladay is starting to show up on a lot of those sorts of lists, which makes one wonder whether or not what we're witnessing here is a late-bloomer assembling a Hall of Fame career. In terms of raw numbers, the 33-year-old Halladay won 21 games this season, giving him 169 on his career, which likely puts him two years away from 200, a total only eight Hall of Fame starting pitchers from the modern era (Koufax being one of them) failed to reach. That means Halladay could reach 200 wins by the age of 35, making 300 a longshot, but not an impossibility. Even without 300 wins, however, Halladay is building a very strong Hall of Fame case for himself, which is particularly impressive given the fact that early struggles and injuries limited him to just two full seasons, including that 2003 Cy Young award year, through the age of 28.

posted by justgary at 12:19 PM on November 18, 2010

The unanimous vote was a surprise, simply because there is usually one voter that goes completely bonkers and throws a vote somewhere you never expect it, just to be different (and some times to draw Google hits for their newspaper web page).

Otherwise, this was expected and well deserved. I'm just glad he won one as a Blue Jay before he left.

posted by grum@work at 04:47 PM on November 18, 2010

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