Price’s time to shine for the Blue Jays
Trailing 1- 0 against Royals, this is the reason the Jays traded for him
There is every reason to believe that David Price will be as effective in baseball’s second season as he has been in its first.
Now, for his Toronto Blue Jays, would be an excellent time to prove it.
Price, who was in the rare position of being at the centre of a controversy even as his team was winning three straight in spectacular fashion over the Texas Rangers, will start his seventh post- season game on Saturday, still looking for his first win in that role.
The Jays, after a bleak 5- 0 loss to Kansas City in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, need one of those if they are to avoid going back to Toronto down 0- 2.
It’s not sound- the- klaxons desperation time yet, but if Price stumbles, one could be excused for leaning toward that button.
The first game of any best- ofseven series, of course, deter- mines nothing other than that the losing team won’t sweep it. Kansas City still needs a Game 2 victory to avoid going on the road to effectively play a five- game series in which they no longer have home- field advantage. Baseball’s playoff format, which will send Toronto home for three straight beginning on Monday, makes that second game all the more important.
But for the Blue Jays in this post- season, Game 2 looms with extra significance, and for reasons quite unrelated to what happened in Game 1.
Price, staff ace, trade- deadline acquisition, purchaser of bathrobes and scooters for his teammates, man who gave the Blue Jays their swagger back, will start at Kauffman Stadium on Saturday afternoon, with nothing short of his reputation on the line.
His first start in this series was always going to be plenty intriguing after what happened in Game 1 of the ALDS: five earned runs in seven innings, which brought his record as a playoff starter to 0- 6 with a 5.48 ERA.
The Price- stinks- in- the- playoffs hot takes were already on a fast boil, despite all the usual caveats that should be applied in such a situation: that six starts over six years cannot be consid- ered sound statistical evidence of anything, that Price is a very different pitcher now than he was in his early years as a starter, that Price gave up just two runs in a complete- game Tampa Bay victory two years ago in Game 163 — a playoff game in all but name.
All of that would have been fodder enough for Saturday’s start,
but then the rest of the Texas series unfolded, which managed to put Price under more scrutiny even though he didn’t start again. Or perhaps precisely because he didn’t start again.
The story is well and truly told by this point — asked on Friday about the decision to use Price in relief in Game 4, John Gibbons responded, “Again?” — but the short version is that the manager really didn’t want to take chances in a win- or- lose game, even with a big lead, and so he threw his only left- handed arm at the time at Texas’ lefty-heavy lineup.
Despite Gibbons’ continued insistence that it had nothing to do with getting Price a relief win, or ensuring that he would be out of the mix in Game 5, that narrative has persisted. It’s not clear what Gibbons could do at this point to get people to believe that he hasn’t lost faith in Price, short of swearing on the life of a particularly cute puppy, and even then I’m not sure it would work.
“I don’t worry about him at all,” Gibbons said on Friday, while Price said, again, that he was cool with his usage, which included the 50- pitch relief stint on Thursday, and said he wasn’t fussed to not be starting Game 1 in Kansas City.
“Whatever this team wants me to do to try and help them win, I’m all about it,” he said. “I knew I was going to be starting one of these games.”
Indeed he is. And while it’s true that another subpar October start would not prove Price does not have some intangible quality that prevents him from performing up to his abilities in the playoffs — he did have a strong eightinning, two- run post- season start last year with Detroit in which he was the losing pitcher — it would also be fair to say that it would throw a considerable shadow over Toronto’s playoff run.
One of the key reasons this team felt so different than in recent seasons was the presence of a big- armed gun at the top of the rotation. Price has easily been one of the best pitchers in the American League for years, the kind of guy that makes a team feel almost assured of a win. ( Toronto won nine of his 11 starts in the regular season.)
If he scuffles again, on top of the poor showing against Texas, it starts to look a lot harder to see the Blue Jays getting through this series, to say nothing of the next one. Rallying from two games down again would be tough. Doing it with an ineffective Price would be, well, not impossible. Not with their bats. But they certainly didn’t acquire him to be their fourth- best starter in the playoffs.
Price said in Toronto after that Game 1 loss that he wanted the playoff monkey off his back. If he loses again, it becomes one of the larger primates.