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Baseball Hall of Fame ceremony: Start time, how to watch and stream Roy Halladay’s induction

Halladay, who spent four of his 16 seasons with the Phillies, will enter Cooperstown as a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Roy Halladay and Carlos Ruiz celebrate the no-hitter in Game 1 of the NLDS at Citizens Bank Park in 2010.
Roy Halladay and Carlos Ruiz celebrate the no-hitter in Game 1 of the NLDS at Citizens Bank Park in 2010.Read moreRon Cortes / Staff Photographer

The newest batch of baseball legends will enter the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Sunday afternoon, but topping the list for Phillies fans is a pitching favorite who sadly won’t be attending the induction ceremony.

Roy Halladay, who spent four of his 16 seasons with the Phillies, will enter Cooperstown as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Among the two-time Cy Young winner’s accomplishments include a perfect game in May 2010 and a no-hitter thrown later that season during the playoffs.

But Halladay’s induction is also a reminder of his tragic death in November 2017, when a plane he was flying crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. According to my colleague Matt Breen, Halladay will be the first first-ballot Hall of Famer since Christy Mathewson in 1936′s inaugural class to be inducted posthumously.

Among the new pieces of memorabilia entering the Hall of Fame with Halladay is a ball given to him by fellow Hall of Fame inductee Mariano Rivera during the 2008 MLB All-Star Game. The ball, which features lines where the longtime Yankees closer traced his grip to teach the then-Blue Jays starter how to throw his signature cutter, was donated by Halladay’s widow, Brandy.

“I’d keep it in my locker, and when we’d go on the road, I put it in my travel bag,” Roy Halladay said of the ball during spring training in Clearwater in 2017, when he returned to the Phillies as an instructor. “Stuck it in a shoe, wherever I went, and if I was struggling, I’d just pick it up. I carried it the rest of my career.”

In addition to the cutter ball, Halladay’s display at the Hall of Fame includes the Phillies hat he wore during the perfect game and his two Cy Young Awards from 2003 and 2010. The display also includes the book The Mental ABC’s of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement, which his wife gave him in 2001 when his poor performance landed him in the minors.

Besides Halladay and Rivera, this year’s other inductees are Harold Baines, Mike Mussina, Edgar Martinez, and Lee Smith.

Leading up to Sunday’s ceremony, the MLB Network will air new conversations with ex-teammates and former managers about each inductee’s career. To speak about Halladay’s career, they turned to two-time World Series champion and former Blue Jays teammate Chris Carpenter.

2019 National Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

When: Sunday, July 21

Where: Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, N.Y.

Host: Brian Kenny

Time: 1:30 p.m.

TV: MLB Network

Streaming: MLB.com (free), MLB At Bat app (requires subscription)

Media coverage

Phillies writer Bob Brookover will be in Cooperstown covering the Hall of Fame festivities. Follow Brookover on Twitter @brookob. Notes and observations about the induction ceremony will be at Inquirer.com/Phillies and in our Extra Innings newsletter.

Live coverage on the MLB Network begins at 11 a.m. with a special edition of MLB Tonight Live, which will feature the acceptance speech of 2019 J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner Jayson Stark, an MLB Network insider and former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter.

Greg Amsinger and Robert Flores will host the special two-and-a-half hour edition of MLB Tonight Live, and joining the broadcast will be Hall of Fame reporter Peter Gammons and MLB Network analysts Joe Girardi and Harold Reynolds.

2019 Baseball Hall of Fame inductees

  1. Roy Halladay, pitcher, Toronto Blue Jays (also played for Phillies)

  2. Mariano Rivera, pitcher, New York Yankees

  3. Harold Baines, designated hitter, Chicago White Sox (also played for four other teams)

  4. Mike Mussina, pitcher, Baltimore Orioles (also played for New York Yankees)

  5. Edgar Martinez, designated hitter, Seattle Mariners

  6. Lee Smith, pitcher, Chicago Cubs (also played for seven other teams)

More coverage of Halladay’s induction into the Hall of Fame

  1. Columnist Mike Sielski took an emotional dive into Roy Halladay’s death, exploring the heroes we think we know and the questions we don’t often ask.

  2. Mike Breen covered everything you need to know about Halladay’s induction, including comments from Cole Hamels, Chase Utley, and Jimmy Rollins.

  3. Halladay’s family decided that the late Hall of Famer will enter Cooperstown without a team emblem, despite pitching the bulk of his career in Toronto.