Price Check in St. Pete

Update A new post on Price can be found here, with more (better) pitch ID's.


Super Prospect David Price will make his first start for the Rays Monday night. After two appearances in relief, the 6'6" lefty out of Vanderbilt gets to make that first start in his home park. Or not, the game is in Baltimore (and Price no-hit the O's into the 5th, but a tough E5 and two singles has loaded it up).

Driveline Mechanics has a nice look at Price's mechanics (and a link to some PITCHf/x data). He checks out very well.

If you follow the link (and the PFX link within), you'll get a little bit about his stuff - a fastball and a slider. That slider looks close to being a cutter/slutter, but I could be wrong, simply since he throws so hard.

I'm labeling the pitches FA (fastball) and FC (cutter, but probably not a cutter), and my IDs almost exactly match Gameday's. So, we're probably both wrong :-)

cfx	#	LHH	RHH	Swing	Whiff	B:CS	ISZ	Paint	Chase	Watch
FA	60	34	26	0.4667	0.2143	3.0000	0.4833	0.1000	0.2258	0.2759
FC	38	11	27	0.5526	0.4286	2.4000	0.5526	0.1316	0.3529	0.2857
	98	45	53	0.5000	0.3061	2.7692	0.5102	0.1122	0.2708	0.2800

Small sample aside, those are some serious whiff rates. A 20%+ on a fastball is quite good (elite good), and, the other pitch, whatever it is, is obviously nasty as all git-up.

The fastball broke 97 against the Yankees in his debut, but he'll probably throw about 95 normally. Or so I've read. The slutter comes in around 87-88, but can go anywhere from 84 to 91.

Plate locations:



You can see he can throw both pitches for strikes.

In these flight paths, you can see the heater tails away from righties, and the slider/slutter/cutter basically is a straight pitch.



The really is more variance, and it will have some more break to it on occasion, but, in any case, the average flight paths show good overlap (again, small sample warning). It's about 7 inches of movement off the fastball path, downward and inward to a righty.

Here are the raw spin movement plots, in case you're curious.