Roy Halladay, the All-Star pitcher who died operating an aircraft, was an addict in the estimation of his widow, who revealed the opinion in a documentary to air Friday.
“Imperfect: The Roy Halladay Story” is being broadcast on the 10th anniversary of Halladay’s perfect game for the Philadelphia Phillies by ESPN E:60 on Friday.
“Everybody saw him as this very strong, dominant person,” Brandy Halladay told John Barr of ESPN. “But he was terrified. He didn’t feel like he had the luxury of making a mistake. He was tormented. He truly was. He was a tormented man.”
Brandy Halladay said she implored Roy Halladay to retire in a me-or-baseball ultimatum in 2013, ending a 16-year career. But she quickly found out he struggled to cope with anxiety, depression and addiction even more when he didn’t have the game. He didn’t know how to, as Brandy Halladay puts it, “self evaluate.”
“Those pills weren’t fixing the problem,” Brandy Halladay says, “they were masking the symptoms for him to do his job.”
Halladay was the pilot of an aircraft with no passengers when he crashed in Nov. 2017 in the Gulf of Mexico. Toxicology reports showed he had opioids, amphetamines, anti-depressants and anti-inflammatory medication in his system that day.
He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2019.
The documentary outlines attempts by the Phillies to intervene and get Halladay help. He spent three months in a rehab facility after his retirement.
Pitcher Kyle Kendrick, a former teammate in Philadelphia, said there were many days when Halladay was present physically but not the same.
“Just the way he was acting, you could just see something was wrong. I tried to talk to him, and felt like he wasn’t there. It was just terrible to see,” Kendrick said.
