Roy Halladay's player page at Baseball-Reference pops with bold ink and staggering numbers: the innings totals, the 20-win seasons, the run of All-Star appearances and Cy Young finishes, the way he single-handedly dragged the complete game into the pitch-count era. But there's one out-of-place number that shouts loudest, a four-digit figure in a three-digits column: 10.64.
That was Halladay's ERA in 2000, when he was a 23-year-old pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was, and remains, the highest single-season ERA in history by anyone with a minimum of 50 innings pitched. For a year, Roy Halladay was the worst major league pitcher there ever was.