"When the Phillies season ended much sooner than anticipated last year, Roy Halladay took off to Mexico for a long golf and fishing trip with one of his best friends in the game…

The Cardinals' Chris Carpenter.

Carpenter and Halladay go back to the minor leagues when they both were coming up through the Blue Jays system. That's not where the similarities end, either. Both pitchers are righthanded and had early struggles in their big league careers that resulted in a trip back to the minors.

Better yet, both pitchers bonded over the book, The Mental ABC's of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement, by the mental skills coach, Harvey Dorfman. Both Carpenter and Halladay figured out that there was much more to the game than mere skill."