

Halladay never even took organic chemistry.

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Just a day after announcing his retirement from baseball, former Philadelphia and Toronto right-hander Roy Halladay returned Tuesday with an even more startling confession — namely that, despite answering to the name “Doc” for almost the entirety of his 16-year career, that he isn’t a medical professional in any sense of those words, nor does he possess any formal training whatsoever in the health sciences.

“No, of course not,” Halladay said when confronted on Tuesday by a member of our Investigative Reporting Investigation Team and asked if he’d ever attended medical school. “I assumed it was pretty obvious from how I was drafted out of high school. I didn’t even go to college.”

Obvious? Perhaps. But not as obvious as the Baseball Reference page which clearly lists Doc as his title. And not as obvious as the literally tens of thousands of results returned by popular search engine Google for the term “doc halladay.” And not as obvious as the tracks of all the tears on all the faces of the all children who’re all disappointed now.

It compels one to ask: if not for any sort of professional reasons, then why has Halladay so thoroughly embraced his familiar sobriquet? It certainly compelled this news organ to ask that.

Halladay’s response: “I assume it has to do with the famous gambler and gunman of the American West, John Henry ‘Doc’ Holliday. Our surnames are similar. Plus, he lived in Colorado, I grew up in Colorado… It’s just a name, though.”

Just a name, says Halladay. And what’s in a name, right? Lies, apparently. And perfidy, it would also appear.