When David Price‘s first pitch crossed the plate and got Game 1 of the American League Division Series going, there was so much optimistic energy in the air at the Rogers Centre that it’s a wonder the umpiring crew didn’t signal some sort of interference.
What followed, however, was a reality check. Both for Price and the Toronto Blue Jays as a whole.
The Blue Jays’ first postseason game since Joe Carter’s World Series-winning home run in 1993 didn’t go well, as they dropped Game 1 of the ALDS to the Texas Rangers by a 5-3 final. Price did well to get through seven innings, but he allowed all five of the Rangers’ runs. Robinson Chirinos dealt the big blow with a two-run homer in the fifth, and Rougned Odor put the nail in the coffin with a solo homer in the seventh.
With the Blue Jays now down 0-1 in the best-of-five series, they must at least be concerned about the well-being of star sluggers Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista. Though the Blue Jays report they’re both fine, they’re certainly less fine than they were after exiting with head and leg injuries, respectively.
But more so than the two of them, it’s arguably Price the Blue Jays should be concerned about.
The 30-year-old ace left-hander had a huge hand in Toronto’s 40-18 showing after the first of August, posting a 2.30 ERA in 11 starts in a Blue Jays uniform after coming over from the Detroit Tigers in a July trade. In so doing, he reaffirmed his status as one of baseball’s very best pitchers.
After Thursday’s performance, though, it’s fair game to refer to Price as one of those guys. You know, a guy who just can’t get it done in the postseason.
Price was money for the Tampa Bay Rays as a reliever in the 2008 postseason, allowing just one earned run in five appearances. But after Thursday’s outing, Price now owns a 5.26 ERA in six postseason starts since 2010. In those, he’s given up 43 hits in 41.1 innings, including eight home runs.
There’s clearly only one conclusion to draw: Price is a spineless weakling who, in addition to a spine, clearly lacks the will to win in October.
Or, we could go with the less sports talk radio-y explanation that Price’s experience as a starter in the postseason consists of a small sample size. As rational beings, we can grant that weird things happen in small sample sizes.
Even still, there’s room for worry. Because right now, the question is not so much what’s caused Price’s postseason struggles as it is whether he’ll be able to change the narrative before this series is over.
After all, rather than whether Price just didn’t have the spine for the job, it makes a lot more sense to wonder whether he flopped against the Rangers simply because it was a bad matchup for him.
Price’s whole operation hinges on getting ahead by pounding the strike zone with fastball after fastball before finishing hitters off with his changeup. He’s typically able to get away with this due to the sheer excellence of his hard stuff and how well he mixes and matches different fastballs.
But at the same time, it’s not unheard of for teams to jump on Price’s in-zone hard stuff and knock him around. That’s what the Rangers did to Price on Thursday, as four of the five hits—including both homers—came on hard stuff that was either in or just about in the zone.
Of course, all teams handle fastballs in the zone well to some degree or another. To that extent, it’s not overly surprising that this is how Price was defeated.
But we should be even less surprised that the Rangers defeated Price in this fashion. It so happens they’re very, very good at hitting hard stuff in the zone. Per Baseball Savant, the Rangers ranked fourth in MLB with a .321 average against in-zone heat and second in MLB with a .536 slugging percentage against it.
With this being the case, one can view Price’s Game 1 defeat as something of an inevitability that creates a sense of unease, if not quite a sense of dread, about him squaring off against the Rangers again in Game 5.
Of course, the Blue Jays would have to get that far in order for Price to have his shot at redemption. And after Thursday’s game, that looks like no easy task.
Exhibit A: Toronto is now down 0-1 in the series. Being down in a series right out of the gate automatically makes everything that much more difficult. In the words of Sterling Archer, duh and/or hello.
As for Exhibit B, what the Blue Jays must now hope is that the next three starters—Marcus Stroman, Marco Estrada and R.A. Dickey—can succeed where Price failed. Given that all three have pitched well recently, this is not a fool’s hope. But given that the three of them have combined for as many postseason starts as you and I have, it’s not an ironclad hope either.
Then there’s Exhibit C, which concerns Toronto’s offense. It always has been and indeed remains the Blue Jays’ best chance of vanquishing the Rangers and moving on to the American League Championship Series. However, the Game 1 injuries to Donaldson and Bautista do raise a pair of red flags. If they’re not 100 percent going forward, then Toronto’s lineup isn’t 100 percent.
Oh, and there’s also the possibility that Texas ace Cole Hamels could make it two tough days in a row for the Blue Jays offense, as even Toronto manager John Gibbons could admit to MLB.com’s Richard Justice: “We got our work cut out for us with Hamels.”
In a nutshell: doom, doom and more doom.
OK, fine. Not actually. It’s not as if there aren’t any silver linings from Thursday’s game for the Blue Jays. As Mike Axisa of CBS Sports noted, one is that the Blue Jays completely shut down the heart of Texas’ batting order. When you can do that, you’re going to win more games than you’re going to lose.
But while there may not be a sense of doom in the air after Price’s ongoing postseason struggles spoiled the party in Toronto on Thursday, there’s at least a sense of doubt that wasn’t there before. The Blue Jays went into Game 1 with all sorts of momentum and all sorts of good vibes after tearing through the league in August, September and early October, but they got humbled.
As Price well knows, the postseason can certainly do that to a player. And as Toronto was reminded for the first time in over 20 years, it can do it to a whole team too.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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