DUNEDIN, Fla. -- Roy Halladay would never take to the mound without his Nike glove. And he would not make a road trip, enter the Rogers Centre clubhouse or visit spring training without three things:
- One of his dog-eared copies of the soft cover book, The Mental ABC's of Pitching, by Harvey Dorfman.
- A piece of dry-erase plastic, roughly 8-by-11 inches, with nine squares.
- A videotape of his best pitches.
The 10-minute tape shows him throwing 20 sinkers, 20 cut fastballs, 20 curveballs and 20 changeups. Every pitch is a strike. He is dominant.
"The tape gives me a reference point and helps develop mental images," Halladay said in the Blue Jays clubhouse yesterday. "When you see it in your head, where the ball is going to end up, it helps when you get in a jam."
This is Halladay's approach to visualization.
To work on his concentration, he turns to the piece of plastic. Inside each square on a 10-by-10 grid are 100 smaller boxes with numbers from 00 to 99.
At first glance, it looks like a Sudoku puzzle, except there are 100 spaces and the numbers aren't repeated.
The night before a start, and again the day he pitches, Halladay gets out his felt pen and checks off one number after another, in order: 00, 01, 02, 03, etc., all the way to 100.
"First time took me over 14 minutes," Halladay said. "You forget what number you're looking for, a thought will pop into your head or you can get distracted."
Halladay lowered his time to 4:15 on May 17, the night before working seven innings against the Los Angeles Angels, allowing four runs.
"When I'm at home, sometimes I'll turn on the TV or stereo as a distraction," said Halladay, who further lowered his ticking time to 4:04 on July 29, the day before pitching 62/3 -- giving up two runs -- to the Oakland A's as the Jays lost on Milton Bradley's three-run homer off B.J. Ryan in the ninth.
His fastest time is 3:37, on Aug. 25, pitching a complete game, allowing both runs in a 2-0 loss to the Kansas City Royals.
Ticking off numbers is how the former Cy Young Award winner improves his focus -- one pitch at a time.
Easier said than done.
Forget the runners. Never mind who is on deck. Ignore the score. Keep it a one-run deficit here and maybe your team will tie it up in the next at-bat. Make the pitch.
This pitch.
"If you tell yourself not to think of something, it's the first thing you'll think of," he said.
Halladay's favourite passage in the ABC's? Tough call, but he does like this one:
A minor-leaguer complains to Dorfman that he is feeling anxiety. Dorfman responds: "I don't care how you feel, I care how you act. The other team can't tell how you feel. They can see how you act."
Makeup is as much a part of pitching as hitting the corners or staying ahead in the count. Bad makeup is stomping around the mound after an ump misses a pitch, or glaring at a shortstop after a ball trickles through the five hole.
"I wasn't like that, but something would happen and I would be: 'Oh no, here we go again,'" said Halladay, of his old mound doubts. "The more you act like that, the more you believe it. And it can go both ways. You have to know what is right."
Halladay had confidence and concentration problems when manager Buck Martinez and general manager Gord Ash demoted him from the Jays to open 2001 at single-A Dunedin.
Now, he has his video tape, his books and his jumbled numbers to align in order. Now he concentrates and he has those other numbers ... an 82-34 won-lost record since returning to the Jays.
