David Price is poised for his best season in a Boston Red Sox uniform and should make a run at winning 20 games behind the league’s best offense.
The Boston Red Sox won a franchise record 108 games last season yet surprisingly, none of their starting pitchers reached the coveted 20 win benchmark. That changes this season and David Price will be the one to achieve that goal.
There were only two 20-game winners in the majors last season. AL Cy Young award-winner Blake Snell led the majors with 21 wins, while 2017 recipient Corey Kluber finished right behind him with 20. Rick Porcello led the Red Sox with 17 wins, putting him in a five-way tie for seventh most in the majors. Price tied for 12th with his 16 wins but should see an uptick in that category this season.
Health concerns have held Price back for the last two years. A worrisome elbow injury limited him to 11 starts in 2017 but he avoided the worst-case scenario and managed to thrive in a bullpen role late in the season. Last year’s return to the rotation proved those concerns are behind him. However, Price dealt with carpal tunnel syndrome which cost him a few outings. He ended up making 30 starts and pitching 176 innings – a solid workload yet one that pales in comparison to his track record.
Price easily topped 200 innings in six of his previous seven seasons prior to the elbow injury that abbreviated his 2017 campaign. He enters spring training without any lingering health issues so there’s little reason to believe he isn’t capable of returning to that workhorse role, enabling him to potentially pick up a few extra wins by virtue of making more starts.
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A review of last season’s game logs suggests Price deserved more than 16 wins. Price received a no-decision seven times last year. He allowed one earned run or fewer in three of those starts and only two earned runs on two other occasions. In the only two exceptions, Price failed to make it through five innings and wouldn’t have qualified for a win. That still leaves five cases where Price pitched well enough to win with reasonable support from his offense and bullpen.
Price suffered seven losses last season and many of them were quite ugly. There was one loss he was tagged with despite allowing only three runs over six innings. Deemed a quality start yet it turned out to be a tough-luck loss.
That line of thought can go both ways though, right? If there were quality performances in which Price wasn’t rewarded with a win he deserved, surely there are cases where he was gifted a win when his offense bailed him out. Well, not really. Price didn’t allow more than three earned runs in any of his 17 wins.
If we project Price to make a few more starts than he did last year and receive the type of run support we expect from the best lineup in baseball, it’s not a stretch to predict Price can reach 20 wins for the first time since 2012.