Announcement: Cardinals pitcher Was unconscious both confirm death by the head coach

Roy Halladay, 40, died in an aircraft crash in the Gulf of Mexico.
Roy Halladay, a two-time Cy Young Award winner who retired from baseball nearly four years ago, died in a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday. He was forty.

Halladay’s ICON A5, a small, single-engine aircraft, crashed off the coast of Florida at midday Tuesday, Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco said in a press conference.

The sheriff’s marine team responded and discovered Halladay’s body in shallow water near some mangroves. No survivors were discovered. Police said they couldn’t confirm whether there were any further passengers on the plane or where it was headed.

According to Nocco, the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the collision.

“We are all shocked and deeply saddened by the tragic death of Roy Halladay, a former Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies pitcher,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “A well-known character in the game, Roy was a strong competitor during his 16-year career, which featured eight All-Star selections, two Cy Young Awards, a perfect game, and a postseason no-hitter.
On behalf of Major League Baseball, I send my heartfelt sympathies to his family, which includes his wife Brandy and two sons, Ryan and Braden, as well as his friends and numerous fans, as well as the Blue Jays and Phillies organizations.

Halladay earned his pilot’s license several years ago and this month posted photographs of himself standing next to a new ICON A5 as part of the plane’s marketing campaign.

In a statement published last month on ICON’s website to promote the A5, Halladay stated that he had “been dreaming about flying since I was a boy but was only able to become a pilot once I retired from baseball.”

In a video uploaded on ICON’s website, Halladay stated that the conditions of his baseball contract prohibited him from holding a pilot’s license while playing, and that his wife was initially opposed to him buying the plane.

“Hard. I fought hard. “I was very against it,” Brandy Halladay stated in the same video, before explaining why she eventually understood and approved of her husband’s desire to own the plane. The video was taken off from YouTube later Tuesday.

Halladay’s dad was a corporate pilot.
ICON, based in Vacaville, California, released an updated model called the A5. It is a two-seat “light-sport aircraft” capable of landing on water. Halladay had owned his ICON A5 for less than a month and was one of the first to fly it, with only around 20 in existence, according to ICON Aviation’s website.

On May 8, two ICON employees, the company’s lead test pilot and the director of engineering, died in a collision in an A5.