It goes without saying that David Price has been a major disappointment through the first half of the 2016 season. Even Tuesday night, a game in which he ended with a strong line, was shaky to start and looked like it could’ve spiraled out of control early. There’s been plenty of reasons that the expected ace has looked like anything but that.
For one, he’s throwing a ton of pitches down the middle of the plate. Major-league hitters will crush those pitches every time. It also doesn’t help that he’s lost some velocity on his fastball, though it’s not as if he’s suddenly Steven Wright or Jamie Moyer out there. It’s also fair to put some of the blame on bad luck given how much better his peripherals have been than the results. Beyond all that, Price’s success (or lack thereof) against left-handed hitters stood out to me when I was looking through his numbers.
Boston’s left-handed starter does not typically carry reverse splits like this, which I believe is an important distinction to make. To be honest, I wasn’t at all sure this was true until I looked it up. However, he’s been much better against lefties in his career, allowing a .262 wOBA to same-handed hitters compared to a .295 wOBA to righties. This isn’t at all a surprise — most pitchers are better against same-handed hitters — but it’s important to realize we’re seeing a (mostly) new version of Price. I say mostly because the split sort of started last year when lefties hit for a .285 wOBA compared to a .265 wOBA for righties. Of course, that’s a different story, since Price was still dominating hitters on both sides of the plate.
This year, the story isn’t exactly the same. Both hitters have put together solid seasons against the 30-year-old. To wit, lefties boast a .325 wOBA while righties have hit for a .312 mark. Both of those numbers are worse than his typical career, and this season has been far from only a problem against lefties, but there is a clearly new issue here. Looking a little bit deeper, the peripherals back up his poor performance. Lefties have hit for an Isolated Power over .200 against Price this year. Hell, Shin-Soo Choo hit a home run last night, and he’s notoriously bad against left-handed pitching. Additionally, he’s striking out less than 20 percent of his left-handed opponents this year. If you’ve been watching him this year, you know that strikeouts haven’t generally been an issue, but it turns out that’s because he’s performed well against righties.
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So, basically everything is going wrong right now. There is a lack of command, as can be seen in the power numbers, to go along with diminished stuff or repertoire, which is clear from the pedestrian strikeout numbers. We’ll start with the power issue, though we’ll soon find out that these two things are unsurprisingly connected. To start, I looked through some batted ball data to find the issue. Perhaps against conventional wisdom, Price is inducing a lot of ground balls against lefties. That would typically mean he’s limiting hard contact and big damage. However, in this case it’s just a side effect of allowing lefties to pull so many pitches against him. Most pulled pitches are grounders (60.5 percent is the league average rate in 2016), and this is no exception against Price. However, when the ball is put in the air, it’s typically done with a lot of force, and once again Price has not been immune. Lefties have pulled the ball over 54 percent of the time against him this year, which goes a long way towards explaining the 16.7 percent HR/FB ratio. That seems unsustainable on its face, but when hitters are pulling the ball this often, it implies there has been enough hard contact to keep this up.
From here, we move over to the Pitch F/X data to see if anything has changed to cause this newfound problem. Of course, it makes sense to begin with pitch usage and it turns out there are some slight changes. Specifically, Price is throwing his cutter and his sinker more against lefties than he has in the past. Unsurprisingly, these pitches have been bad this year. Neither is inducing whiffs on more than 11 percent of swings, and the sinker specifically has been crushed to the tune of a 13 percent HR/FB ratio. More generally speaking, there is more power coming off his hard pitches from lefties than ever. Of course, this is likely mostly explained by the aforementioned loss of velocity. The most important issue, though, explains both the lack of strikeouts as well as the increased power. That can be seen simply by looking at where he’s throwing the ball against lefties.
That’s a lot of pitches down the middle of the zone, where hitters just aren’t going to miss despite the platoon advantage. Obviously, this helps lead to the power, but it also means he’s inducing fewer swings and misses, which makes it hard to put up his typical strikeout numbers.
Price has one more start before this forgettable first half comes to an end and he needs to figure out what’s been ailing him. Whether it’s something physical, mental or mechanical, something is off. Lefties haven’t been the only hitters to tee off on him, but they’ve been really good against a pitcher who usually dominates them. Getting the platoon splits back on track would be a strong first step towards being the pitcher we all expect him to be.