David Price Should Be Okay

(Written before Price dominated on Thursday)

Obviously there is some concern about David Price.  So I went and dove into his numbers to see what I could figure out. (All data below was obtained through FanGraphs, who coincidentally also wrote an article about Price, with similar methodology and results.)

So let’s start at the top and look at his ERA.

| ERA
—|—
Career | 3.19
3 Year Average | 3.01
2016 | 6.75

Yikes!  His ERA this season is more than twice what we’ve ever seen out of Price.  This is no surprise to anyone. But we all know that historical ERA isn’t really a good predictor of future ERA (it includes too much “noise” from things that the pitcher can’t control).  So let’s look at some metrics that are better indicators of the way he’s pitching.

| SIERA | xFIP
—|—|—-
Career | 3.36 | 3.34
3 Year Average | 3.09 | 3.07
2016 | 2.99 | 2.94

Okay, so according to both xFIP and SIERA, Price is actually pitching as well as he’s ever pitched.  Nothing to be concerned with here, and in fact we should be really happy with how he’s pitching.

In most cases, when a pitcher’s ERA is significantly higher or lower than their xFIP and SIERA, it can usually be chalked up to variance and you should expect things to settle back to their historical numbers.

Over his career Price’s ERA has actually outperformed his xFIP by almost half a run per 200 innings pitched.  Which makes it even more peculiar why this season his ERA would be *lagging* his xFIP by such a significant margin.

So let’s go a little deeper and try to figure out *why* his ERA is so much higher than his xFIP.

Well, the obvious first things that jump off the page are his BABIP and Left on Base % (LOB%)

| BABIP | LOB%
—|—|—-
Career | .286 | 75%
3 Year Average | .298 | 74%
2016 | .373 | 54%

His BABIP is 75 points higher than his three-year average and he’s stranding 20% fewer runners.  It’s easy to look at these numbers and say he’s just getting unlucky on balls in play and getting unlucky on batter sequencing.

The LOB% I can buy being just bad luck, but the BABIP I want to check on.  Let’s look at his batted ball profile and see how unlucky he’s been on balls in play:

| LD% | GB% | FB% | Soft % | Med % | Hard %
—|—|—-|—-|—-|—-|—-
Career | 20% | 44% | 36% | 18% | 56% | 27%
3 Year Average | 22% | 42% | 36% | 17% | 55% | 28%
2016 | 29% | 40% | 31% | 17% | 42% | 41%

Uh-oh.  His soft-hit and ground-ball ratios are constant, but in 2016 he’s giving up more line drives and harder contact by a significant margin.  Giving up more line drives and harder hit balls helps explain his elevated BABIP… It’s not just bad luck.  By my calculation his xBABIP based on this batted ball profile is .361.  That’s slightly lower than his actual BABIP (.373), but still way higher than his career average.

This is definitely a bit concerning, but let’s see if we can figure out why he’s giving up such hard contact.  First place I like to look is his command and velocity numbers.

| Fastball Velocity | Fastball %
—|—|—-
Career | 94.6 | 35%
3 Year Average | 93.6 | 23%
2016 | 91.8 | 12%

Another red flag.  His fastball velocity is down almost 2mph from his three-year average.  I did check, and his velocity went up about 1.5mph between April and August last year so we should see his velocity pick up as the year goes on, but this isn’t something you want to see out of a guy you just spent $217M on.  To go along with the reduced velocity, you are seeing Price rely way less on his four-seamer.  He’s basically replaced it with two-seam fastballs and cutters, hoping the movement he gets out of them makes up for the reduced velocity.

But how is he doing with his slightly altered pitch selection?

| K% | BB% | Zone % | Contact % | SwStr%
—|—|—-|—-|—-|—-
Career | 23% | 6% | 47% | 80% | 9%
3 Year Average | 25% | 4% | 48% | 79% | 10%
2016 | 29% | 7% | 48% | 71% | 14%

First takeaway is that his strikeouts are actually up!  Despite the reduced velocity, he’s striking out more batters and inducing more swing and misses.  These are good signs that his “stuff” is still there.

Not shown above, but he’s not getting guys to chase pitches like he used to (3% drop in swing rate on balls out of the zone compared to his three-year average), but on pitches in the zone he’s getting way *more* swing and misses (12% improvement on batter contact rate on pitches in the zone).

**So what does this all mean?**

As far as I can tell, Price will be fine.  He’s lost some velocity, so you are seeing him switch from a four-seam fastball to a two-seam fastball.  Because of the movement on these pitches, he’s getting more swing and misses when he throws strikes.  But with the drop in velocity, when guys do put the bat on the ball, they are doing so with more authority. What this means for Price is he will need to get his offspeed pitches working to keep batters off balance and induce more swings on pitches out of the zone.  Namely his changeup which has seen a big drop in value so far this year.

His LOB% should stabilize and if he can start commanding his changeup better, his BABIP should drop as well, which will make his ERA start to resemble that of the Price the Red Sox paid for this offseason.

The best news of all? It’s only May, so we have a lot of baseball left.  No need to panic yet, as far as I can tell.





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