David Price‘s path began in Tampa Bay, and it has since passed through Detroit and Toronto. Along the way, he’s made five All-Star teams, won a Cy Young and has been generally awesome.
Now, the ace left-hander’s path has taken him to Boston and its humble baseball abode known as Fenway Park. The usual line of thinking says success in those parts doesn’t come easy. And so, we must ask:
Is Price ready for this?
The Red Sox are betting big on the idea that he is. As Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe was first to report Tuesday, Price has agreed to join the Red Sox on a seven-year contract worth $217 million. Assuming he passes his physical, the former Ray, Tiger and Blue Jay will become the richest pitcher ever.
The size of Price’s contract is no surprise. He’s coming off a 2015 season in which his 2.45 ERA netted him his second American League ERA title in four years. Overall, Baseball-Reference.com WAR puts him among MLB‘s six most valuable starters since 2010. He’s good. Really good—$217 million good.
Hence why he appealed to the Red Sox. They’ve lacked a No. 1 starter ever since trading Jon Lester in 2014, and that cost them dearly in 2015. Only five clubs got worse ERAs from their starters. In the short term, at least, Price can help fix that.
As for whether he’ll be elite enough in the long term to actually earn his $217 million, well, that’s where there are opinions galore, and they’re all over the map.
On one hand, you have FanGraphs projecting the 30-year-old left-hander to produce enough WAR to be worth it. On the other hand, you have Sports Illustrated‘s own WAR calculations saying he won’t be worth it. On a miraculously grown third hand, you have the mystery box that is Price’s third-year opt-out. When looking at this deal from a wide perspective, what you see is a great, big cloud of noise.
So, if we’re going to make sense of Price as a fit for Boston, we must zoom in.
No matter where he ended up signing, Price was going to be walking into a high-pressure situation. Pressure comes with the territory with many-zeroed free-agent contracts. Because out of all things important, nothing tops sports and the people who play them. It is known.
But Boston? Boston is on a whole ‘nother level. The city’s fans and media tend toward the Miles Davis end of the intensity spectrum. On the “Tough Places to Play” rankings, Boston is up there.
Many a Red Sox player can vouch that the pressure can break a man. Not long ago, it got to Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez. Even as recently as this past season, Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez seemed to wrestle with it.
To succeed where these guys have failed, composure is key. And if there’s a reason to doubt Price’s ability to handle Boston, it’s the reality that he’s not immune to losing his composure.
Back in 2014, Price instigated a feud with Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, seemingly in response to Ortiz hurting Price’s feelings when he admired a pair of home runs off him in the 2013 postseason. Speaking of which, that same postseason also saw him snap at reporters when they dared to criticize a poor performance. That, especially, is something he’ll need to avoid in Boston.
However, it’s just as easy to look past all of this and focus on the virtues of Price’s personality.
It’s not as if Price has never pitched in high-pressure environments. He’s played almost exclusively on winning teams throughout his career, getting quite a bit of postseason experience as a result. Also, his many years as an AL East pitcher granted him plenty of exposure in New York and, of course, Boston.
Also, Price definitely isn’t afraid of the spotlight. He’s among baseball’s most active (and interactive) social media users, and he is clearly comfortable being one of the sport’s most visible players. It’s all part of his personality, which is nothing if not likable.
Besides which, there’s one theoretically foolproof way for a Red Sox player to keep the pressure at bay: live up to expectations. If Price can do that, he should be OK.
Because one wants to be nice, one wants to say there’s a 100 percent chance of Price’s ace status aging gracefully. Sadly, one can’t do that.
Price is at an age when pitchers tend to start declining, after all, and his status as a power pitcher arguably makes him especially prone to a decline. Per the research presented by Bill Petti at FanGraphs, Price is already past the point when starting pitchers begin leaking velocity at a rapid rate.
On that note, what Price did in 2013 and 2014 isn’t a good look. His average fastball fell from the 95-96 mph range to the 93-94 range, and he only managed a good-not-great 3.29 ERA. When looking at Price’s return to excellence in 2015, it’s hard not to notice that his velocity bounced back into the 94-95 range.
As such, there would appear to be a correlation between Price’s effect on the radar gun and his effect on opposing hitters. That’s a troubling look on anyone. It’s an even more troubling look on a power pitcher who’s now on the wrong side of 30.
Thus is the big fear with Price. But now that we’ve acknowledged it, we can get into the reasons for optimism.
One area where Price apparently doesn’t need top-notch velocity is in his ability to miss bats. He posted a career-best 11.9 swinging-strike rate with strong velocity in 2015, but that came on the heels of a previous career-best (as a starter) 10.6 whiff rate with lesser velocity in 2014.
This points to how Price has moved to make himself less reliant on his hard stuff. Per Brooks Baseball, his overall fastball percentage has been on a downward slope ever since 2011. On the flip side, his rising off-speed usage links his recent swinging-strike mastery to an increased willingness to change speeds.
One AL scout discussed this with Scott Lauber of the Boston Herald:
I’ll give Price credit. He’s starting to show his changeup, with a purpose at times, for the right reasons. He’s throwing breaking balls early in the count. He’s showing he’s maturing from a power pitcher, and when he does lose a degree off his fastball, he’s still going to be able to pitch with that because he’s learning the value of setting up hitters and not worrying about blowing guys away.
All of this is important. A swing-and-miss habit plays everywhere, including at band boxes like Fenway Park. And though Price won’t be repeating his 2015 swing-and-miss mastery if his velocity drops down again, it’s possible he’ll at least maintain the strong swing-and-miss habit he had with lesser velocity in 2014. That had less to do with his arm and more to do with his mind, which now clearly understands the value of a trusty changeup.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the sheer nastiness of Price’s changeup is only becoming more pronounced. Its whiff rate is going nowhere but up. So, too, is its degree of arm-side fade. It’s attracting whiffs not so much on deception, but on good, old-fashioned movement.
As Owen Watson of FanGraphs noted, Price has become especially willing to go to his changeup to finish off right-handed batters. That’s one reason why he was able to hold them to a career-low .609 OPS in 2015.
But not the only reason. Per Baseball Savant, Price also pitched right-handed batters on and off the outside edge of the strike zone a career-high 58.8 percent of the time in 2015. Against those pitches, they hit just .193 with a .266 slugging percentage.
As for where Price picked up these tricks, he might have learned them at his new home ballpark.
Fenway Park hasn’t frightened Price all that much throughout his career. In 11 career starts in Boston—all of which happened before 2015—he’s posted a 1.95 ERA and held opposing batters to a .550 OPS.
In posting these numbers, Price has needed to dominate right-handed batters. Though Fenway Park is probably a neutral park for righties and lefties, righties have a big advantage when it comes to the long ball. Given that, it looks good that righty batters have hit only .207 and slugged .326 against Price in his career outings at Fenway Park.
As for how he’s pulled that off, it turns out Price was feeding right-handed batters changeups and outside pitches regularly at Fenway Park even before he made a habit of it elsewhere in 2015.
If Price is going to continue to succeed at Fenway Park, he’ll need to continue owning right-handed batters. To that end, he clearly gets it.
Lest anyone begins thinking the Red Sox have pulled off a slam dunk with their signing of Price, the elephant in the room is his durability. As good as it looks that he’s been healthy enough to log more than 1,400 innings since 2008, that’s a blessing that could very well prove to be a curse. Pitchers are durable until they’re not, and Price’s past workload may mean the clock is ticking on his durability.
But at the least, we can say the Red Sox aren’t nuts.
Beyond the reality that Price’s 2018 opt-out might save them from actually having to pay him $217 million, the Red Sox aren’t putting a square peg in a round hole. Price is exactly the kind of pitcher their rotation has been lacking, and his personality and pitching style are solid fits for his new surroundings.
So, yeah. What everyone else is saying. The Price is right, etc.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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