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Roy Halladay, the good doctor, leaves behind a sparkling legacy

Fred Thornhill / Reuters

The thought of Roy Halladay's Hall of Fame induction ceremony was so delightful because, on that day, he would have to smile - something he studiously avoided doing for all those years he was the greatest pitcher on the planet. (There were, at times, extenuating circumstances; if you throw a no-hitter in the postseason, you're going to crack.)

Even though his brilliant career tapered off rather abruptly, he was going to get in sooner or later, and it was going to be a glorious day, especially for those fans in Toronto and Philadelphia who had watched Halladay steadfastly deny himself the indulgence of relishing his own excellence.

But - because the world, it seems, refuses to give us a break lately - Halladay won't be at his induction ceremony. On Tuesday afternoon, Halladay died when he crashed his two-seater airplane, his favorite toy, into the Gulf of Mexico. He was 40. He is survived by his wife, Brandy, and his two boys, Braden and Ryan.

In the hours following his death, the outpouring of emotion from across Major League Baseball was overwhelming. With his heart aching, Chase Utley, a presumptive Hall of Famer, expressed his gratitude to Halladay for "allowing us to witness what it takes to be the best." A similarly "heartbroken" Dan Haren admitted that he "wanted to be Roy Halladay." C.J. Wilson lamented the loss of "unequivocally a hero of our baseball generation." Of course, the Toronto Blue Jays, who took a teenaged Halladay with the 17th pick in the 1995 draft and watched him blossom into an icon, released a heartfelt statement championing him as "one of the franchise's greatest and most respected players." The Philadelphia Phillies, who acquired Halladay from Toronto following the 2009 season and also reaped the benefits of his immense talents, released a touching statement, too. But this one line in particular from the Blue Jays' statement stands out:

It is impossible to express what he has meant to this franchise, the city and its fans.

It's ironic the Blue Jays would use that word - "impossible" - because it's one that Halladay clearly wasn't familiar with. To someone who famously wrested his career from the brink, whose early-morning, quasi-masochistic workouts inspired their own mythology, "impossible" is a failure of will. That said, articulating Halladay's significance to Toronto and the Blue Jays is indeed difficult - not only because his impact was so profound, but because he was so beloved for so many reasons. He had crazy talent, but still evinced a workmanlike approach to his craft. He could be overpowering, but preferred to frustrate opposing hitters. He was a star, yet wildly humble. He was intimidating, but still charming. He was nominally a doctor, but, in practice, a dedicated tradesman and prodigious artist.

And once people started calling him Doc, though he sometimes bristled at the nickname, Halladay was tireless in his service of good, applying proverbial salves every fifth day to make the ensuing four bearable for Blue Jays fans. The Blue Jays, for most of his tenure with the club, were really quite bad - from 1998 through 2009, they only once finished better than third in the American League East - but the good doctor could always alleviate the symptoms of chronic I-can't-bear-watching-this-team-itis. Quite simply, for a very long time, Halladay was the only reason to watch baseball in Toronto. By the time he left, a new generation - with no real memories of the halcyon early '90s - was hopelessly hooked. That's how good he was.

In 1998, in his second-ever start in the big leagues, a 21-year-old Halladay came within one out of a no-hitter. By 2002 - following a transformative four-year stretch that at one point saw him relegated to the High-A Florida State League - he was an ace, a stoic beast whose militaristic conditioning regimen and off-the-charts pitchability allowed him to log an ungodly volume of innings. The following year, Halladay won his first Cy Young Award, crafting a 3.25 ERA (145 ERA+) over 36 starts while leading the American League with an outrageous 266 innings pitched and 6.38 strikeout-to-walk ratio. And so it went. From that sensational summer through his final year in Toronto, no pitcher in the major leagues accrued more WAR than Halladay, whose Herculean efforts helped him usurp Dave Stieb as the putative best pitcher in Blue Jays history. Over that span, Halladay failed to finish in the top five of AL Cy Young voting just twice, fashioning a 3.16 ERA (143 ERA+) over an average of 210 innings per year while leading his league in complete games five times.

After the Blue Jays, out of necessity, sent him to Philadelphia, Halladay continued to burnish his resume. In 2010, he won a second Cy Young, threw a perfect game, and pitched the second playoff no-no in MLB history; in 2011, he ended up second in Cy Young voting. And, amazingly, he did all this (outside of a few momentary lapses) while displaying all the emotional range of a Buick.

Those who assumed, however, that the coldness he exuded on the mound defined him off of it were sorely mistaken. Halladay was an inexhaustible philanthropist, regularly inviting and hosting little patients at the Hospital for Sick Children (and their families) in "Doc's Box" at Rogers Centre. Resolute in his belief that pro athletes are overpaid, Halladay donated $100,000 annually to the Jays Care foundation. On numerous occasions, Halladay was the Blue Jays' nominee for the Roberto Clemente Award, given every year to the player who, for all intents and purposes, invests the most time into community service. Not long ago, Halladay made a donation to his local sheriff's office, in Pasco County, so it could get a new service dog (which, of course, was named Doc). And if Tuesday is any indication, there are roughly a million former teammates who would jump at the opportunity to extol the virtues of Roy Halladay, the human being.

Halladay was also a devoted family man. Reporters often marvelled at how Halladay's ferocious intensity at work would dissipate the second one of his sons popped into the clubhouse. After retiring, Halladay, still relatively young, rejected overtures from the Blue Jays and Phillies about possible coaching opportunities to focus instead on Brandy and the boys. Why coach in the big leagues, after all, when you can coach your son? (Most recently, he served as pitching coach for Braden's high-school team, which, Halladay proudly noted, ranked fourth-best in the country in May.)

All of this is to say that Roy Halladay was, beneath that icy veneer of competition, positively wonderful - a marvelously gifted athlete who used his fame and fortune to help people, committed fiercely to his craft without neglecting his most important relationships, and somehow, through all of it, never gave off so much as a whiff of self-satisfaction. Publicly, he never gave off much of anything until he retired, when he softened, as so many do, and his frosty on-field demeanor gave way to a surprisingly goofy, fun-loving dad #brand.

But, tragically, that suddenly goofy, selfie-snapping, joke-cracking, charity-giving, cigar-smoking, airplane-loving dad is gone. He won't get to wave at his boys from a Cooperstown podium, or enjoy the thunderous ovation the Rogers Centre crowd will conjure up when his name is added to the Level of Excellence someday in the near future. Now, that famously elusive smile - which he'd been whipping out more generously in recent years after concealing it for so long - is part of a legacy of baseball excellence and humanitarianism and just general good-guy-ness that will endure for a very long time, and not only in Toronto and Philadelphia.

Still, the richness of that legacy can't yet be separated from the agonizing irony that Halladay - a lock for seven, maybe eight quality innings each time out - is gone way too soon.

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