THERE’S A PRICE TO PAY
Failure to land ace could cost Yanks in East race
One can only imagine the churning feeling in Brian Cashman’s stomach as he watched David Price methodically mowing his way through the Yankee lineup Saturday, allowing barely a threat and making a statement about what his presence in a Toronto Blue Jays uniform is going to mean over the last two months of season.
For in the days leading up to the trading deadline, the Yankee GM had waited in anxious anticipation to see which way his buddy Dave Dombrowski in Detroit was going to go — sell or buy. And when, with three days left, it turned out to be the former, Cashman prepared to make his bid for Price, the Cy Young-minted lefty who everyone agreed was potentially the biggest difference-maker on the market. We’ll never know what that bid was going to be — other than it would not have included any of the Yankees’ top three prospects, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge or Greg Bird — because apparently Cashman never got to make it.
Before Cashman could say, “I’m in,” Dombrowski had traded Price to the Blue Jays for their top pitching prospect, Daniel Norris, and two other minor leaguer pitchers, in the wee hours of July 29 and. With the Jays having made their blockbuster deal with the Rockies for Troy Tulowitzki the day before, the American League East, where first place has been the Yankees’ exclusive domain since July 3, experienced a seismic tremor.
Saturday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, that tremor felt ominously more like a fullblown earthquake coming. Here was Price, the guy that got away, following up on the Blue Jays’ 10-inning, 2-1 “statement” win in the first game of
this showdown series the night before, shutting the Yankees out on three hits over seven innings and riding yet another homer outburst — Justin Smoak’s grand slam, the first ever by a Blue Jay at Yankee Stadium, and a solo shot by Tulowitzki — by the major leagues’ most explosive offense, and suddenly the Yankees’ division lead was down to 2.5 games.
“He was David Price, locating outside, mixing his pitches, being who he is,” said Joe Girardi resignedly.
Certainly not the David Price the Yankees saw amid the frigid, snowy conditions of Detroit in April, when they dealt him one of his earliest exits ever — just 2.1 innings after allowing 10 hits and eight runs — but as Girardi had said before the game: “You have to throw that snowball game out.”
Such is the long season. Both Price and Dombrowski are gone from Detroit and the Blue Jays, who started the season with seven rookies on their roster, including Norris in the rotation, and whose closer, Miguel Castro, who was later demoted
and then included in the Tulowitzki deal with Colorado. They have come all the way back from 5051, eight games behind on July 28, with seven straight wins and 15 out of 21 since the All-Star break. Indeed, since the break, they’ve outscored the opposition 109-64 and scored six-plus runs an MLB-best 51 times.
Still, Price didn’t have to be told what his start Saturday against the Yankees represented.
“Of course, I knew,” he said. “It’s actually harder pitching when the team is going well. More pressure, because you don’t want to be the guy who stops that. I didn’t pitch as well as I can, but I’ll take it.”
“This is what we envisioned when we pulled the trade off,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said. “Every time he goes out he gives you the chance to throw a shutout.”
According to Gibbons, he got a call from his boss, Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos, around midnight on the 30th, telling him the deal for Price could be made, and when he woke up the next morning he had a second marquee player for the stretch run. “I only know Alex was on (Dombrowski) constantly, asking him what he was going to do, and that Dombrowski promised him he’d call him as soon as he decided.”
T The fact that Cashman had so many other well-regarded “chips” beyond his top three — second baseman Robert Refsnyder, catcher Gary Sanchez, pitchers Bryan Mitchell, Branden Pinder and maybe even Ivan Nova, who matched zeroes with Price through the first five innings before giving up the grand slam to Smoak in the sixth — leads one to believe that Dombrowski had his sights set on Norris and that Anthopoulos made sure not to let him waver.
To hear Gibbons tell it, is to hear the same thing Terry Collins has been saying about the Mets since the trading deadline.
“There’s definitely a different feel in this clubhouse.”
Beware of the Blue Jays. That tremor being felt in the AL East is them.