25 years ago today, Halladay made a career-defining turn toward Cooperstown

In March 2001, Roy Halladay was as far away from Cooperstown as he could possibly get.

He was not Toronto’s Opening Day starter.

He was not in the Blue Jays’ rotation.

He wasn’t even on the Blue Jays.

Halladay was sent to the Minors. And the worst part? He was sent all the way down to High-A.

“He wasn’t ‘Doc’ Halladay yet,” said Vernon Wells, who was his teammate for a decade.

But where the season started for Halladay was not where it ended. Working his way through three stops in Toronto’s farm system, he returned to the big league club midseason and made his breakthrough appearance on Aug. 1, 2001. That’s the date that a retooled Halladay earned his first win in 381 days and truly took his first steps toward the Hall of Fame.

The remaking of the then-23-year-old right-hander began with the bold decision by the Blue Jays, sending Halladay down to the very bottom rung of the ladder and praying they could build him back up.

This wasn’t the path anyone anticipated when the Blue Jays made Halladay their first-round pick (17th overall) in the 1995 MLB Draft. He rose quickly through the system, made his big league debut at age 21 in 1998 and famously lost a no-hit bid with two outs in the ninth inning in just his second career start.

Blue Jays radio announcer Tom Cheek started calling him "Doc," a nod to the legend of the Old West.

But Halladay stumbled after that. He bounced between starting and relief roles in 1999, then endured an ugly 2000 campaign in which his 10.64 ERA was the highest mark by any pitcher since earned runs became official in 1913.

The poor results continued in the spring of 2001, and then-Blue Jays manager Buck Martinez was at a loss for answers.

“I’m sitting with Mark Connor, the pitching coach, on the field at Dunedin, and [Halladay is] getting hammered again,” Martinez remembered. “I said, ‘Mark, what are we going to do with this guy? He’s too good to give up on.’ We just had to figure out how to make him better.”

On the day of final roster cuts, Martinez and general manager Gord Ash told Halladay he was being bussed all the way to High-A.

The Blue Jays were also a bit puzzled by the young fireballer’s mental approach, and they let him know that the demotion was aimed toward helping both his pitching and his attitude.

“It was put to me as, it was time to grow up,” Halladay said in a 2017 interview. “There’s a difference between having ability and doing something with it.”

Halladay began his season with 13 appearances out of the bullpen for High-A Dunedin. He showed some progress, striking out 15 batters and walking only three, but the major changes happened in May with a move to Double-A Tennessee, where former Blue Jays pitching coach Mel Queen joined the rebuilding project.

Queen pulled no punches and took an old-school approach to the job.

“There’s no one I made that drastic a change to and verbally abused the way I did Doc,” Queen said in a 2003 interview. “There aren’t many people that would have gone through what I put him through. I had to make him understand that he was very unintelligent about baseball. He had no idea about the game.”

Queen broke down Halladay’s delivery and bluntly told him that his four-seam fastball and curveball combination was not working. His over-the-top delivery offered no deception. He was getting clobbered because his pitches weren't fooling anyone.

Queen’s solution was to get Halladay to focus on a hard sinker and cutter combo, while slightly dropping his arm angle.

“When we heard he was going to a three-quarters delivery, the first thing we thought was, 'Oh boy, they’re trying anything just to salvage this kid now,'” said former Blue Jays reliever Dan Plesac.

As important as relearning mechanics, Halladay also began to understand more about mental preparation after his wife Brandy gave him a copy of Harvey Dorfman’s book, “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching.” It was here the pieces really started to fall into place.

“I brought a negative approach to the game,” Halladay said in a May 2001 interview. “I thought it was just a matter of finding what I’d done to be successful in the past. It never crossed my mind that mentally preparing myself might be a factor."

Halladay, who would befriend Dorfman a year later, began to narrow his focus.

Not long after that, a new-look Halladay began to tear apart Southern League lineups.

In five starts at Double-A, he pitched to a 0.91 WHIP and a 2.12 ERA.

Halladay made two successful starts at Triple-A Syracuse to close out June before he got the call he had been hoping for. He rejoined the Blue Jays on July 1.

On July 7, Halladay made his first Major League start in almost 10 months when he faced the Montreal Expos in Toronto. He gave up three runs off eight hits over six innings, but he limited damage and struck out a career-high 10 batters.

After the game, Halladay credited his new mental approach.

“I didn’t really have any idea how important that was to pitching,” he told reporters.

Still, it had been more than a year since Halladay had won a Major League game. That changed on Aug. 1, when “Doc” Halladay returned.

In a 3-1 win over Minnesota, Halladay scattered six hits over eight innings of one-run ball. He threw 56 of his 83 pitches for strikes, and the downward movement on his pitches resulted in 20 ground-ball outs and just two fly balls to the outfield. He mowed down the Twins in a game that took just two hours and one minute to complete.

“It was bowling ball after bowling ball after bowling ball,” Plesac remembered. “They couldn’t get the ball in the air.”

“He was on his way to becoming the pitcher we all thought he could be,” Martinez said.

In what would become a familiar sight over the next decade, Halladay fired sinkers and cutters in the low-to-mid 90s, stymying batters with pitches that moved in opposite directions, as well as a split-fingered pitch that dove straight down.

“He just looks like a different guy,” play-by-play man Dan Shulman said.

“You can just see the confidence oozing from him,” marveled color analyst and former Blue Jay Pat Tabler.

Speaking to reporters after the game, Halladay seemed to understand that he had crossed a line in time, a clear place of demarcation from the career he was having to the one that was ahead of him.

“It’s been a long road, but the things I’ve learned along the way are going to help me the rest of my career,” he said. “It was long and tough, but I think I came out better.”

From Aug. 1, 2001, through his last fully healthy season with the Phillies in 2011, Halladay went 175-77 (.694 winning percentage) with a 2.95 ERA and a 4.6 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He combined his new mental toughness with a physical routine that few could keep up with.

“You expected greatness every time he stepped on the mound,” Wells said.

Chris Woodward, who played parts of seven seasons with Halladay in both the Minors and the Majors, was in awe of the transformation he witnessed in 2001.

“Once he came back, my God, you talk about determined,” Woodward said. “He stayed [mentally] locked in. You could tell all the demons of anything that he was dealing with in the past, he didn’t want that to come back. You could tell there was a fear there, like, ‘I don’t ever want to go back to that place.’”

At the end of the season, Halladay reflected on his long and winding road back to the Majors.

“I felt like it was a fresh start this year,” he said at the time. “I just want to get that chance to do it from the beginning of the year next season.”

Halladay was Toronto’s Opening Day starter in 2002 and made the first of his eight All-Star teams. The next year, he won the first of his two Cy Young Awards.

“Doc” Halladay was on his way to Cooperstown.