The Long Goodbye

So they've traded Roy Halladay.

Now, we wait for the official announcement, and we wait to watch Halladay pull on another team's uniform and smile for the cameras and talk about how excited he is to be in Philly. As much as we've been prepared for this for months, and as much as we've eagerly anticipated the conclusion to this endless saga, it's still going to hurt like hell to see Roy Halladay in another team's uniform.

As our colleague quite aptly noted yesterday, the affection that Jays fans had developed for Doc went far beyond his statistical value. There was a level of reassurance in knowing that Halladay would be there, and even if the rest of the pitching staff blew up, you knew that you'd get a great pitching performance once every five days. You knew that you had a Strong Foundation, a bona fide Ace, a Number One Pitcher, and a Cornerstone. You had what almost every other team wanted, and he was inherently yours.

Now, that's gone. Now, we have to learn to live with the chaos and uncertainty of a starting rotation in constant flux. And we'll have to appreciate and savour the occasional great pitching performances from Jays starters that we'd come to take for granted from Doc.

Now, we move on.

Living in Oblivion
There was something vaguely Rip Van Winkle-ish about the past two days, as we found ourselves generally cut off from the up-to-the-second rumouring and reporting of the conclusion to the Roy Halladay trade saga. From Friday morning through until this morning, we had no TV, no internet connection, a BlackBerry with a nearly dead battery and a crappy sports radio station to which we couldn't subject ourselves, much less Mrs. Tao.

When we checked our Twitter account sometime on Sunday and instantly saw cryptic references to the Halladay trade going down, we flipped out for a few minutes and scoured around in a panic to find any information we could. Finding solid information on Twitter was quite a challenge, as every wisenheimer that we follow was more interested in making funnies about which local delicacy was being shipped to which city, or whether if the mascots were to be involved in the trade somehow. (Which is totally and patently ridiculous. Because the Phanatic is an elite level mascot, while Mariner Moose has never been the same after crashing into the outfield wall and snapping his hind leg.)

If there was a positive aspect to being mostly isolated from the news of the trade, it was that it gave us some time to reflect on the news, rather than reacting to each bogus report or scouring the Baseball Cube to tally up the relative value of this prospect and that one and whether if this is a good or bad move, or what have you.

(It also allowed our good pal The Ack to shine like the crazy diamond that he is. Great work this week, dude. Now take a breather and have a Fort Garry Ale. You've earned it.)

There will be plenty of time to assess the relative merits of this move. Years, even. There's probably no good sense in trying to declare winners and losers at this point, so we'll probably hold off on the instant analysis of the deal for at least another couple of hours.