Red Sox: What’s wrong with David Price?
Following his latest discouraging outing, is it time for the Boston Red Sox to be worried about their ace, David Price?
The struggles for David Price continued on Saturday, this time resulting in his first loss of the season at the hands of the New York Yankees. His latest letdown snapped a personal six-game winning streak at Yankee Stadium and ensured the Boston Red Sox would lose their first road series of the season.
We all wanted to chalk up his first couple of ugly outings as a fluke. It’s still early, we’d tell ourselves. Price has a history of getting off to a slow start, just wait until we get through April. Well, we’re through the opening month of the season and May isn’t looking any better. Price has surrendered six runs in each of his two starts this month, marking the first time in his career he’s given up that many runs in consecutive starts. Through seven starts this season he’s given up at least five runs on four occasions.
Price’s ERA has ballooned to cringe-worthy 6.75, putting him at the bottom of the American League among qualified pitchers. Opponents continue to string together hits against him, inflating his batting average against (.278) and WHIP (1.38) to career-worst levels. By his own admission, Price has been the weakest link on this Red Sox team battling for first place in spite of his woes.
Is this what $217 million buys you these days?
“My first seven starts… this has sucked,” a frustrated Price told reporters on Saturday, per CSNNE’s Sean McAdam. “It’s not fun for me. I don’t enjoy it. I’ve got [to] get better.”
So what does Price need to do in order to get better?
Next: Fixing his delivery
The team insists he is healthy, so let’s get that out of the way to start. Sure, it’s possible that Price is hiding an undisclosed injury, but speculating that without any evidence beyond, “He’s not pitching the way David Price should be pitching,” would be irresponsible.
Manager John Farrell believes Price’s biggest issue is the lack of a consistent finishing pitch. That evaluation has some merit in the wake of Price’s last start, where he was constantly getting ahead of batters, only to end up giving up a hit with two strikes. Putting hitters away was a problem against the Yankees, but hasn’t been the overlying issue this season. Price’s 11.54 K/9 is the best in the league among starters and would represent a career high. He’s also not walking batters at a significantly higher rate than his career average.
While the manager insists that Price’s issues aren’t mechanical, one of his teammates disagrees. Dustin Pedroia revealed that he noticed a difference in Price’s delivery while watching film, pointing out to the pitcher that he’s not lifting his leg as high or in sync with the movement of his hands. While it may seem like a relatively minor difference to most of us, hence why it went unnoticed for so long, Price believes making that adjustment will make a big difference.
Dustin Pedroia showed David Price he's not lifting his leg as high or in sync with his hands as years past. Price believes it's a big fix.
— John Tomase (@jtomase) May 8, 2016
Yet you get the feeling it’s going to take more than that to get Price back on track.
Next: Losing velocity
Price’s greatest concern is his drop in velocity. His fastball typically sits around 94-95 MPH, but this year it’s been averaging 91.8 MPH. It’s not uncommon for power pitchers to take time to ramp up to their peak velocity, so Price’s fastball has always been a tick slower in April. Except this year his velocity has started out even lower than it normally does and still hasn’t jumped up to the mid-90’s level we expect after seven starts.
“The more velocity that you have, the more mistakes you can get away with,” explained Price. “Right now I’m not getting away with mistakes.”
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Price is still capable of mowing down opposing lineups, but every mistake is more costly when he isn’t able to overpower hitters with his fastball. When you make a mistake over the plate throwing 95, it’s a lot harder for most hitters to take advantage. If you miss in the same spot throwing 91, big league hitters are going to make you pay.
Price’s struggles may start with the mechanical flaw that Pedroia noticed, but they are compounded by the loss of velocity. The first issue is correctable, so a slight adjustment to his delivery should result in better execution of his pitches. If this leads to less mistakes then it won’t matter as much what his fastball clocks in at.
Next: Is this the start of a decline phase?
The second issue should sort itself out, as Price’s history tells us that his velocity will ramp up when the weather heats up. The native of Tennessee spent the bulk of his career in sunny Tampa Bay, so there may be some truth the notion that the weather has effected him. We’ve had an unusually chilly spring thus far and Price has pitched in some poor weather conditions where it was either cold or raining, or both.
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We expect that Price’s velocity will pick up as we head into the summer months, but what if it never reaches his typical career levels? He’s now over 30, an age where power pitchers have been known to lose a little on their fastball. Not to suggest that Price has completely lost it already, but this could be a sign of a steady decline where we’ll see him lose a little bit each year until the 91-92 MPH we’re seeing now becomes his new normal. Can he continue to be an ace caliber pitcher with that type of velocity? Not based on what we’ve seen this year.
This is Year One of a seven-year deal that Price signed with the Red Sox last winter. When you sign a pitcher his age to a long-term deal you expect to pay for some regression on the back end, but the hope is that the elite performance you receive in the first few years of the deal makes up for it. If Price’s tenure with the Red Sox is starting out this poorly, what’s it going to look like near the end of it?
Next: Need to execute pitches
We knew Price would eventually need to learn how to pitch with diminished velocity, even if we weren’t expecting that day to arrive so soon. He still throws a nasty slider and a solid changeup that he can use to keep hitters off balance. He simply needs to be more cautious of where he locates his fastball if he’s not able to blow hitters away with it.
Ultimately it boils down to execution. For the most part, Price hasn’t been pitching poorly. He’s still striking out hitters and the amount of walks and home runs he has given up isn’t drastically higher than his career averages. His 2.93 FIP is actually better than what he’s produced over his career and stands as a better indicator of how he’s performed than his bloated ERA does.
Next: Another Red Sox lefty failure?
Price’s problem is that he’s made a couple of mistakes in each of his poor outings that have come back to bite him. He needs to buckle down and execute those pitches better in order to avoid the big inning that has caused too many of his starts to unravel. At least until his velocity returns, if it returns at all, Price simply can’t afford those types of mistakes.
He recognizes that the results so far this season have been unacceptable. Now it’s on him to figure out how to fix it.