The situations are similar, but hardly identical. Halladay, who turns 33 in May, was a superstar pitcher on a baseball team that never reached the postseason during his time there, and seldom had a realistic chance. McNabb, 33 last November, has been the cornerstone of the Eagles' most consistently successful decade ever.
Halladay was and is beloved, not just in Toronto, but throughout Canada. With the Expos long gone from Montreal, the Blue Jays are Canada's team. During the Olympics in Vancouver, several people noticed "Philadelphia" on my credential and asked what I thought of Halladay. They had the resigned tone of someone whose home has just been damaged by a hailstorm. They understood, but that didn't mean they had to like it.
"I loved my time in Toronto," Halladay said. "It wasn't about the same place. For me, it became about winning. I don't think I would have had a problem if we had the attitude of the guys in here and the potential to win games over there. It would have been different."
Even his staunchest supporters wouldn't use the word "beloved" to describe McNabb's relationship with Eagles fans. Let's be nice and say it is "complex" and leave it at that.
But those differences, looked at a certain way, add up to a similar situation. Halladay was well-liked but felt it was time to move on and add a championship to his personal accomplishments. McNabb is a lightning rod for fan frustration after a decade of being achingly close to a title, and it is the team, not him, that has decided it may be time to move on.
Those are two paths to the same place: a superstar athlete being at the end of a relationship with the one franchise he has come to represent.
