The Boston Red Sox look to be the highest bidder for free agent starting pitcher David Price. What will it take for him to wear a Red Sox uniform?
Friends are great to have, but money also helps take care of the family when the friends are elsewhere. That’s the sentiment that most Toronto Blue Jays fans should remember. The Boston Red Sox fans sure do, after they saw their own ace starting pitcher Jon Lester sign as a free agent with another team. Sure the circumstances were slightly different, but David Price has to look at the reality of the situation: his value may never be more than it is right now. Why shouldn’t he get the payday that his skills deserve?
The Blue Jays have been known for years to not want to pay any player too much money for too many years, both of which are what Price is asking for in this offseason. Sure, he loved playing in Toronto and loves the boys in the dugout; however, if you think that Price isn’t going to accept the money that will secure his family financially for the rest of their lives because of some form of loyalty to his baseball brothers then you are fortune’s fool.
The media have kept a close eye of the Price situation, with the following being the latest update:
There's a high expectation among execs involved in David Price bidding that Boston will generate highest offer. But as w/ Lester, (more)
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) November 25, 2015
Certainly, the Red Sox are in desperate need to better their starting rotation, and Price would be a great addition. He went 18-5 with a 2.45 ERA in over 220 innings in 2015. The 30-year-old lefty’s closest competition on the Red Sox would have been Wade Miley with a 11-11 record and a 4.46 ERA. In fact, the Red Sox had three pitchers with double digit wins, the other two being Joe Kelly and Eduardo Rodriguez whom both had 10 wins. And, it wasn’t like Boston couldn’t score runs. The team was fourth in both major leagues with 748 runs. The majority of the losses had much to do with the pitching. To take that even further, anyone who’d say that Price benefitted from playing on the Blue Jays, who scored 891 runs, he played the first half of the season with the struggling Detroit Tigers, who scored just 689 runs for the year. With all of that said, money is always going to be a major factor but it isn’t everything. Another tweet from Olney reminds us of that fact, very clearly:
… the next question will be: Where does Price really want to go? Lester turned down higher offer from SF to sign with the Cubs.
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) November 25, 2015
So, just because the money is bigger in Boston, it doesn’t mean it’s better. Lester went to the Chicago Cubs partially due to his relationship with his former general manager Theo Epstein. It’s easy to forget that Price’s original team two years ago was the Tampa Bay Rays, with the Cubs’ current manager Joe Maddon.
The former Rays helmsman guided Price through much of his career; why wouldn’t he want to go to have a reunion and make history with one of the oldest organizations in sports history? Blue Jays fans think they’ve had a playoff drought, think about how the Cubs fans would feel if Price could join Lester and 2015 Cy Young Award winner Jake Arrieta to form possibly the best starting rotation in baseball and bring a World Series to Chicago, which hasn’t happened in 107 years. Heck, it’s been 1945 since the Cubs even made it to the World Series, while all of Toronto was dancing in the streets for making the playoffs for the first time since 1993.
Besides the money and the club’s history, what does Price have as a connection to want to move to Boston? What’s holding him back from signing with the Cubs, in order to have the big pay day and the brotherly love? It’s definitely something that Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski will have to overcome if he were to land Price.