Doc Halladay No Longer Blushing Unseen

 

Roy "Doc" Halladay
Sports Saturday

The baseball postseason is off to an amazing start, what with Roy “Doc” Halladay pitching only the second no-hitter in playoff history to begin it. And it was his first game ever pitching in the postseason!

The other no-hitter is enshrined in legend: Yankee Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Admittedly Halladay’s is less dramatic, coming in an earlier game and being one walk short of perfect. Nevertheless, it is still something. (You can read my post about perfect games, including Halladay’s own perfect game earlier this season, here.)

By the way, here’s a fun fact. Did you know that, while Larsen’s no-hitter occurred in baseball’s 53rd season, Halladay’s appeared 53 seasons later? So every 53 seasons, someone throws a no-hitter in the playoffs. Cue the music from the Twilight Zone.

Can literature add any insight into the occasion? Probably not a lot. But Halladay’s story on how he came to the Philadelphia Phillies calls a poem to mind.

Halladay has arguably been the best pitcher in baseball for the past ten years, but other than those who follow baseball regularly, few know about him. This is probably because he used to pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays, which have not been in the playoffs since 1993 and which are regularly pushed into the shadows by their two glamorous division rivals, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. If this were baseball in the old days, Halladay would suffer the fate of Ernie Banks, the legendary Cub player whose team never made it to the playoffs (I write about that here). Noticing that his team was building for the future and fearing that he was losing his window of opportunity, Halladay asked to be traded and ended up with the powerhouse Philadelphia Phillies.

The fact of his being “buried” in Canada got me thinking about one of the great poems of the 18th century (and of British literature generally); Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The passage I have in mind is the following:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

“You’re comparing Canada to a baseball desert ?!” So I imagine Jason Blake, regular contributor to this website, complaining. Okay, maybe that’s stretching it. But few consider the Blue Jays one of baseball’s glamor teams.

Gray looks at the negatives and pluses of blushing unseen. It’s bad if, under other circumstances, you would have become a Milton standing up to tyrants. It’s good if, but for being born in an out-of-the-way hamlet, you would have become one of those tyrants, say a Cromwell:

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes,

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind . . .

Gray concludes that it is better to walk quietly than make a big splash:

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Halladay, however, wanted to pitch before the madding crowd. So far it has paid off.

Which means that, if we want to find poetry that will do justice to his feat, we perhaps need to shift out of 18th century pastoral poetry and turn to the heroic romanticism of the Victorian era. Say, Browning’s “Andrea Del Sarto” where the painter narrator says of Raphael, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” Halladay is one of those few ballplayers who has traded teams to reach for greatness and actually grasped it (others are Reggie Jackson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and (finally last year) Alex Rodriguez). Far more often, the record of such moves is one of failure. “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.”

Unless we are his Cincinnati Reds victims, we should all be happy for Doc.

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