Worrying Time: Phillies Lose Again, The Doctor Is Not Well

No excuses left, sadly.

It wasn't a couple of flukes. It wasn't
the catcher. It wasn't bad luck with the long ball, and it wasn't Doc
needing a couple starts to round into form. Roy Halladay of April 2013
is simply not the Roy Halladay of 2010-11. The question is if he ever
will be again, and from the returns tonight, it's hard to be terribly
optimistic.

Needless to say after this gloom-and-doom intro, the
Doctor got hit hard tonight. A three-run shot from John Bonds Aaron
Killebrew Buck on a pitch Roy left dead-red in the zone in the second
was all that was really needed, but more discouraging to me was when the
Phillies finally got on the board with a scraped-together run in the
bottom of the fourth, and after having a 1-2-3 top of the fourth, Doc
gave the run right back in the next inning on a double and a single in
just the blink of an eye, when in years prior he'd have just started
hitting his groove and mowing hitters down with mechanical
inevitability. In the end, Roy gave up seven in just four innings of
work, two of which were cashed in off Chad "Hey, you made your bed, you
lie in it" Durbin when he relieved the Doctor in that 5th innning. The
Phils lost 7-2.

Nothing about this was encouraging.

The
three-run homer, the bad start to the fifth, those were the worst of it,
but they weren't the whole picture. Doc was missing wide and low all
night, and missing badly--the ESPN crew on the telecast even showed one
pitch to Quintero during warmups that sailed about a foot to the left.
For the second-straight starts, he walked three batters, something he
only did once in all of 2011. The body language was bad, the
communication was bad, everything was bad, bad, bad. Bad Roy Halladay.
You never thought you'd see the day, and certainly not this soon.

And
not like the Phillies really needed a contrasting example, but Matt
Harvey was certainly willing to provide one tonight. The Mets' young
starter certainly appears to have all the trappings of an ace in the
making, a zipping fastball, excellent location and a confidence (yes,
fine, swagger) belying his 23 years. He struck out nine, only
walked one, and gave up just one run on three hits--two if you don't
count that lazy Ike Davis throw to first that Chase easily beat out.
He's a starter the Phillies are going to have to reckon with for many
years to come, as if there weren't already enough of those to go around
in the NL East.

And of course, one of those pitchers used to be
Roy Halladay. But after his first two starts of the season, expecting
that guy to magically reappear anytime soon doesn't seem particularly
realistic. Maybe he's somehow hurt and there's something that can be
done to fix him. Maybe it's mental and there are ways he can unburden
himself. Maybe he just needs to accept there are certain things he can't
do anymore, and use his legendary drive and work ethic to find out how
to maximize his success with the tools he has left. Maybe it's a
combination of all three.

I don't pretend to know the answers. I
just know what everybody else now knows--that the guy wearing #34 for
the Fightins tonight was not the guy who threw a no-hitter in his
first-ever post-season start, who perfecto'd the Marlins on a late
Saturday afternoon in May, who averaged 20 wins a game over his first
two seasons in Philadelphia and seemed a safe pencil-in for about that
many more every year he took the mound in the Red and White. And I have
no idea what the Phillies are going to do without him.