TORONTO — The Blue Jays have thrown down.
Two days after acquiring Troy Tulowitzki in a six-player deal, the Jays went out and pulled in the biggest fish on the trade-deadline market, hauling in former Cy Young Award winner David Price from the fading Detroit Tigers for some more of their prospect capital, as reported by Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi.
Was the cost high? Absolutely. Did the Blue Jays pay too much? Probably. Have they made themselves into a World Series contender? Yep.
Price is a rental, and the idea of giving up a total of 18 years of Daniel Norris, Matt Boyd and Jairo Labourt for two months (plus playoffs) stings quite a bit, but the Blue Jays now have an honest-to-goodness, game-changing, top-of-the-rotation ace for the first time since Roy Halladay was here.
He’ll make only 11 or 12 regular-season starts—the first two against the Royals and Yankees—but with the six-foot-six lefty in the fold, the Blue Jays are now easily the favourites to break from the pack scrapping it out for one of the two wild-card spots. They’re seven back of the Yankees for top spot in the A.L. East and the reward of both skipping a wild-card play-in game and being able to comfortably set a playoff rotation, but they still have 13 games to play against the Bronx Bombers and Price could wind up starting four of them.
The first pick overall in the 2007 draft, Price was in the big leagues two years later, playing an important role as a reliever in the Tampa Bay Rays’ run to the World Series. He was traded to the Tigers at last year’s deadline and helped get Detroit to the playoffs. He pitched well (two runs allowed on five hits over eight innings) in his only October start, but the Tigers lost the game 2–1 to get swept out of the post-season.
The southpaw is owed almost $7.5 million for the rest of the season, which takes up pretty much every penny of the war chest the Blue Jays carried into the year, and his acquisition certainly leaves them thin if a starting pitcher should go down, and desperate if they should lose two. Without Norris and Boyd as ready replacements, they’d be looking at Randy Wolf or Jeff Francis as rotation help should a starting pitcher get hurt, or maybe a return of Scott Copeland or Felix Doubront, if he clears waivers after being designated for assignment Wednesday afternoon.
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It’s shocking that the Blue Jays would pay such a steep price for someone who is likely gone after two months (they’re hoping three), but the key to the transaction is the fact that the Jays are a very good team that has yet to find its footing. They’ve outscored their opponents by an even 100 runs over the first 102 games of the season, and the reason that they’re scuffling along at .500 instead of being neck-and-neck with the Yankees for the top of the division is because of their pitching issues, many of which have now been solved.
The Blue Jays are second in the major leagues with 16 blown saves, but have added Aaron Sanchez and LaTroy Hawkins to the bullpen in the last week, making the relief corps much deeper, scarier and more reliable.
Sanchez went on the disabled list after his June 5 start against Houston, and the Jays have since filled his spot with Plan D (Copeland), Plan E (Boyd) and Plan F (Doubront). (Sanchez was already Plan B—with the injured Marcus Stroman being Plan A—and Norris was Plan C.)
The trio combined to make 11 starts over which the Blue Jays went 2-9, thanks mostly to the fact that they put together an ERA of 7.55 and a 1.831 WHIP while pitching a combined 39 1/3 innings over that span—that’s an average of just under 3 2/3 innings per start. Those numbers, to put it mildly, are disgusting. And that spot will now be filled by David Price, who is one of the best starting pitchers in the game.
Over his 21 starts for the Tigers this season, Price has pitched to a sparkling 2.53 ERA, which is fifth in the league, just ahead of Chris Archer. His 1.11 WHIP ranks seventh, just ahead of Felix Hernandez. He’s fourth in the league in innings pitched and strikeouts, seventh in strikeout-to-walk ratio and 10th in opponents’ OPS. Nobody needs to be sold on David Price.
What they do need to be sold on, though, is shipping Norris, Boyd and Labourt down the 401 West. Well, maybe just Norris. Boyd was solid in his first big-league outing but in his second had one of the worst starts in major-league history. That won’t define him, of course, and he’ll be back in the big leagues soon enough, but there are serious concerns about his ability to succeed as a fly-ball pitcher in a hitter-friendly ballpark like Rogers Centre.
As far as Labourt, the Blue Jays’ lone representative in this year’s All-Star Futures Game, opinion is divided as to whether he actually profiles as a starter in the bigs. A lot of people think he’ll wind up in the bullpen and if that’s the case, you don’t even blink when asked to include him in a package for a legitimate ace like Price.
Norris is the big key. The 22-year-old lefty blew the doors off in Spring Training, forcing his way into the starting rotation by dominating Grapefruit League opposition after cutting a swath through Dunedin and Buffalo (with a minor hiccup in New Hampshire) on his way to the big leagues last season.
He’s the total package, but he has yet to find his groove with the Bisons this season as he tries to work his way back to the majors. The walk rate has spiked, the WHIP is over 1.5 and he’s striking out fewer hitters than he ever has. Can he get through this and get back to being the stud he looked like he was going to be last season and when the Blue Jays snatched him as the top high-school lefty in the draft in 2011? I certainly wouldn’t bet against him.
But here’s what this comes down to: If Price doesn’t help get the Blue Jays into the post-season, this trade will hurt a lot.
I have been on the record saying that a high-priced rental isn’t the answer for this team, that they’re too far back of the Yankees to say that they have a good chance of winning the division, and that I wouldn’t trade my finest meats and cheeses for a guy who is presumably going to be gone (for nothing in return) in two months.
But this is David Price. A concrete David Price as opposed to the abstract concept of a “top-of-the-rotation rental pitcher.” And seeing him pull on a Blue Jays uniform is going to be awfully exciting. While the Jays did move Norris, they kept Stroman, Sanchez and Osuna, the three pitchers who should form the core of the starting rotation for the next half-decade. There are also people in the organization who are crazy about righties Sean Reid-Foley and Conner Greene, both of whom could arrive as soon as late 2016.
With the improved bullpen and the big jump in infield defence with the addition of Tulowitzki, Price puts the Blue Jays clearly in the catbird seat as far as a spot in the wild-card game is concerned. And if there are two off-days between the end of the regular season and that one-game playoff, which there usually are, they can guarantee that they’ll be able to start one of Price, Mark Buehrle or the resurgent R.A. Dickey in that game even if they have to go to the last day of the season to secure the spot (though who’s kidding who—it’s going to be two innings each of Sanchez, Osuna and maybe even Stroman if the Blue Jays wind up in that game).
There’s a chance this is a very painful trade for the Jays, that fans will lament the loss of Norris in three years the same way they’re lamenting the loss of Noah Syndergaard today. But flags fly forever, as they say, and Price makes the Blue Jays one of the top three teams in the American League from this point on.
David Price is not a gamble. The gamble is that with the additions of Price, Tulowitzki and Hawkins (and perhaps the September returns of Stroman and Michael Saunders), this extraordinarily talented Blue Jays team will finally hit its stride, quit hanging around the .500 mark and go out and win a bunch of ballgames.
Remember, last year’s Kansas City Royals were 50-50 after 100 games. The 1989 Blue Jays were 54-56 through 110 games, with no wild-card door to sneak through. Going into September of 2011, the Tampa Bay Rays were 7.5 games out of a playoff spot and the St. Louis Cardinals were 8.5 games out. All those teams made the playoffs.
The 2015 Blue Jays are currently two games from a post-season berth that’s held by a very smoke-and-mirrorsy Minnesota Twins team that is coming to town for a four-game series next week.
Oakland GM and wizened sage Billy Beane says that the first two months of a baseball season are to see what you have, the next two months are to fix it and the last two months are to win. That seems to be the formula Alex Anthopoulos has used this year, and now it’s up to the players to follow through. It’s going to be a very exciting stretch run, the likes of which we haven’t seen around these parts in more than two decades.