TORONTO – I have a message for David Price: sports journalism, both in Boston and elsewhere, will survive any limitations you place on it. I mean, I don’t know how deciding to talk to the media only after games you’ve pitched accomplishes anything. You want to make a point? Shut it down entirely. Go the full Steve Carlton. But if you really did tell Dan Shaughnessy that “they did this to themselves,” as if somehow your words and thoughts are from God’s ear to ours?
Man, if that’s the case you really should have gone to St. Louis instead of Boston. I mean, really … what the hell were you and your agent thinking? You’re not cut out for a big media market. Think about it: you were great in Tampa Bay and Detroit – hell, you re-signed in Tampa with a no-hope franchise and courted the Tigers before they traded you to the Blue Jays. Nobody willingly signs in those two cities. In Toronto, you landed in the middle of the best summer the city had seen in two decades, bringing your bon mots and scooters and bathrobes for your teammates and loving all the popcorn at the Rogers Centre. You said and did all the right things because how could anybody not during those few magical months? And, true to form, you were less than expected in the post-season. Again.
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Price’s woes in Boston last season go back even before his playoff flop – he gave up five runs and six hits in 3 1/3 innings in a 6-0 loss to the Cleveland Indians, leaving him with a 2-8 post-season record and a WHIP of 1.230. He signed a seven-year, $217-million free-agent deal that pays him $30 million in each of the next two seasons, after which he can opt out and leave $127 million on the table, and promptly posted an earned run average of 3.99 that was a run and a half higher than his ERA in 2016.
Along the way, Rick Porcello supplanted him as the team ace and won the American League Cy Young Award. This past winter, the Red Sox traded for Chris Sale, effectively demoting Price to the third starter’s spot even before an elbow injury ruined his spring training. Both the team and player turned it into some sort of drama, never coming clean one way or another. Hey, that’s their prerogative: but it’s also red meat in a healthy, competitive media market.
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Look: I never bought into the whole Zen of David Price thing. He was easy to interview; smart guy, made eye contact, spoke in sentences … I mean, the dude went to Vanderbilt so he must have opened a book at some point. He would have been a good subject even if we weren’t in a time where we’ve lowered the bar so much in interviews that just having a player not tell you to go piss up a rope is enough to send you scurrying away telling everybody what a “good guy” he is. But he was never, ever, ever going to re-sign in Toronto.
I took grief from the true believers for saying it, for saying it didn’t matter whether Alex Anthopoulos or Pat Gillick or Mark Shapiro or myself were general manager. It’s a big leap from “I love the popcorn at your ballpark” to “I want to pitch for you and pay taxes to you for the rest of my life.” As I said often: I was told by a Blue Jays executive the day after Price pitched his first game that the chance of him re-signing here was “less than zero at best.”
Price joined the Blue Jays at the 2015 trade deadline. (Nathan Denette/CP)
Which is ok, you know? Nothing wrong with making people feel good while you’re playing for their team. I believed all along that Price would find his comfort zone in a place like St. Louis – the Cardinals felt they had him signed to a seven-year, $187-million deal until the Red Sox blew their bid out of the water – and marvelled that he went to Boston, where making the playoffs doesn’t matter. Seriously: if you’re not going to win the World Series, Red Sox fans would just as soon you don’t bother making the playoffs so the Hot Stove League can get an early start.
Who would have thought that signing the richest contract for a pitcher in baseball history, having one of the worst years of your career, flopping in the playoffs and then watching your team trade away valuable prospects because it doesn’t trust you any more – in Boston! – would lead to uncomfortable questions? Not David Price, apparently, who has just taken a kind of half-measure in a war that is completely unnecessary. It’s shocking naivety, really, and perhaps a timely case study for the likes of Bryce Harper, Manny Machado and maybe even Josh Donaldson, who will all be part of that free-agent bonanza after 2018, with or without whatever is left of David Price’s career.
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