Roy Halladay's joy in living allows us to smile a little amid sadness

Ryan Fagan

•
Roy Halladay's joy in living allows us to smile a little amid sadness image

I have no idea how to properly start a column about the death of Roy Halladay. 

The news Tuesday afternoon was stunning. The single-engine aircraft Halladay was piloting, an Icon A5, crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. He was 40 years old. Forty. Ugh.

Halladay was the best baseball offered, as a competitor and as a person. Fans of the Blue Jays and Phillies loved Halladay because he was one of them. Fans of every other team loved Halladay — except on game day — because they wanted him to be one of them.

MORE: Sports world takes to Twitter to mourn Halladay's death

With Halladay on the mound, your team felt invincible. The tall right-hander with the smooth delivery and pinpoint control had a way of rising to the moment. He waited 12 years to make his first career playoff appearance, and he threw a no-hitter in that start, against the Reds in Game 1 of the 2010 NLDS for the Phillies. Everyone in baseball knew he would be great in that start, and somehow he still managed to exceed expectations. 

That was Roy Halladay, a person who was not afraid of the moment, on the baseball field or in his post-career life. 

Here’s what Halladay wrote in the “bio” box on his Twitter profile: “Courage is not being fearless but rather acting in spite of the existence of fear!”

SN CANADA: Halladay's Jays career marked by excellence

Halladay loved that plane, that Icon A5. A quick scroll through the top of his Twitter feed shows that pretty clearly. He was so proud. He posted pictures and videos of his time in the air and he retweeted tweets of people he took flying. 

In retrospect, they’re heartbreaking. 

I started scrolling through Halladay’s Twitter timeline as I tried to digest Tuesday’s awful news. The very last tweet he ever sent was a selfie with his youngest son’s baseball team celebrating. Halladay has a giant smile on his face. I quickly noticed those two things were constant themes: celebrating life with his boys and giant smiles.

PHOTOS: Notable sports deaths of 2017 

He only tweeted 450 times since he joined the social media platform in March 2014 — the spring after he retired — but almost every tweet was about his love of life and embracing his post-playing years. It took him a while to get used to the medium; his very first tweet was about a fundraiser, and he posted the picture upside down. 

About an hour later, he sent another tweet, this time with the photo correctly aligned. And 16 minutes after that, he posted he exact same tweet. Halladay was learning a new craft. That evening, he sent a tweet showing the humor he would learn to perfect on Twitter. 

Maybe this is dumb, but I found a bit of solace in scrolling back through Halladay’s Twitter timeline. I didn’t follow him, but I wish I would have. He would have made each day he tweeted just a bit better. I’d like to share some of those with you now, if you don’t mind. Maybe they’ll bring a smile to your face like they did to mine.

IN HIS OWN WORDS: Roy Halladay, SN's 2010 Pro Athlete of the Year   

Halladay loved fishing. His eighth and ninth tweets were of him holding trophy fish — a largemouth bass in Tweet 8 and golden dorados in Tweet 9. In Tweet 11, he gave us all a glimpse of the wit that made him a favorites with teammates and other players, too. Halladay shared pictures of his family — his wife, Brandy, and their kids, Ryan and Braden, usually on the baseball diamond. 

On April 26, 2014, Halladay shared a photo of the day he finished training to be a pilot. He loved posting smiling selfies with his planes. A couple months after his training, a series of tweets where he’s clearly trying to figure out how to post a GoPro video of his flight in a Cessna plane. Here’s the 13th tweet in that series. 

And later that day, he’s relaxing with an Oreo double-double. There’s a picture of Halladay strapping a bobblehead of himself into a seatbelt. One of him holding a penguin, at the zoo with a guy who always wanted to go to the zoo with Roy. 

He tweeted pics of himself as a kid, when his dad was a coach on his team. 

And the smiles. Damn, the smiles. This is a man who enjoyed the hell out of his life. We remember him as having intense focus on the mound, when he was all about business. Zero distractions as he practiced his craft. After baseball, though, the man smiled at everything, with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that is infectious. 

This is one of my favorite Halladay tweets. 

And then the time he tweeted about a traffic ticket. 

And then the time he tweeted about another traffic ticket. 

And the puppies. Halladay loved tweeting about puppies. Not just the family’s puppies, but the puppies he worked to rescue, too. 

Halladay loved making people smile. He made me smile today, even on an awful day.

Thanks, Roy. You'll be missed. 

Ryan Fagan

Ryan Fagan Photo

Ryan Fagan, the national MLB writer for The Sporting News, has been a Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2016. He also dabbles in college hoops and other sports. And, yeah, he has way too many junk wax baseball cards.