Watching David Price, Who Is Throwing Strikes

David Price's bad starts are the best in baseball. Not in a practical sense, like his worst is better than anyone else's worst. Quite the opposite: when Price has a bad night, it can get really bad. In his fifth start as a Detroit Tiger last season, after coming over in a deadline deal with the Tampa Bay Rays, Price opened the third inning by allowing six Yankees to score without even recording an out; two more base runners charged to him came around after his merciful exit. In his fourth start this year, again against the Yankees, Price surrendered eight quick runs in two and a third innings. So Price is certainly no master evader of off-days, and his are as rough as anyone's.

What I mean is that Price's bad starts seem less incoherent, less nakedly aberrant, than those of other top-line pitchers. The progression familiar to anyone who watches baseball—the ace's fastball, for whatever reason, sails wide; the breaking ball doesn't bite; batters walk until one sends a cookie high into the bleachers; the manager takes a sympathetic frown out to the mound and reaches for the ball; the ace shrugs his shoulders after the game and speaks of talent as an object that may be misplaced, I just didn't have it today—doesn't really apply here. For Price, the occasional evening of trouble seems an unavoidable byproduct of an approach.

David Price throws strikes. This is his whole gambit; his mantra is "On or out in three pitches." Most of the strikes are fastballs, and most of those are on the corners. Sometimes, though, all of these hard strikes catch too much plate and there follows a torrent of base hits and an early exit, too many batters on instead of out. Price, placing the ball in his manager's palm, looks glum but not mystified. He knows that much of what causes the odd start like this also fuels the many very good ones to either side of it. It's worked out well for him. There is a reason he is the most sought-after pitcher remaining as the trade deadline approaches.

Price's rough nights, then, are a kind of periodic offering to the balance of baseball. As for his good nights—well, on David Price's good nights, he seems less inured to worry than structurally incapable of it. He stays in the strike zone. Batters tend toward out in three pitches. It all makes sense.

On those routine good nights, Price brings to mind certain eras of machinery, early industrialism—steam setting big iron wheels to spinning and big iron arms to churning, machines that from the cool vantage of the twenty-first century seem themselves to sweat—or something even older. Under a darkening sky between the brick walls of Comerica Park, Price turns to metal. He looks in, tall and impassive, at the plate and the batter. His motion—knee lifted at a sharp angle; leg sent out; arm orbiting quickly over the top, like the neck of a catapult—is the same every time. Every once in awhile, after he's let the pitch go, he'll repeat the motion in reverse, as if refitting himself to a mold. Detroit is a good place for all this.

Price's fastball flies in tempo but not quite perfect repetition, missing occasionally along one axis but rarely along both, thrown hard enough that the missing does not much matter. It is the kind of fastball that makes the distinction between fast and hard significant. He cuts it sometimes, sending it sneaking over the outside corner to right-handed hitters, but this seems less mischievous than something more serious—invasive, maybe, or subtly, coolly violent. Price's change-up and slider offer no relief from the grim style: each is a minor variation on brute forward motion, like the way an airplane behaves a little differently over sea than over land.

Price is not elegant or fine. His stuff may not be beautiful, except under a particularly encompassing definition of the word. But it has a tragic component that we commonly associate with beauty, a sense of sacrifice in the service of ideology. It seems always to be the eighth inning in Detroit, and Price has filled the strike zone and given up a few hits but only one run; he's thrown 115 pitches and thrown them all hard enough that he ought to be showing some sign of wear, but he only removes his cap and wipes his brow quickly and comes set, and the next pitch is 95 in on the hands. Aces who have found easier ways work in stadiums across America, spinning their ornate and shadowy stuff. Price just sweats his steam-sweat and throws the ball hard, again.

It is a mode—accomplished, resolute, with a whiff of defeatism—that Price's teams tend to mirror. The Rays, when he was in Tampa, were upstarts in one instant and hangers-on the next. They made a World Series but in retrospect never enjoyed an observable prime. Price joined Detroit just as a half-decade of prosperity started to fade; this season, he has been the Tigers' only star player to avoid injury or a marked downturn in production. Detroit is selling, and appears willing to sell Price for an appealing-enough offer.

Price may very well be on his third team by week's end. The Tigers' struggles have made him a member of a pitching trade market that includes…well, a great many pitchers, from the already moved Johnny Cueto and Cole Hamels to James Shields and Tyson Ross and Jeff Samardzija, among other peers. And so the present discussion surrounding Price has a prognosticative bent. This time of year is just like that.

If in a few months Price is pitching for a new club deep into the postseason, though, the David Price that exists at this moment will be worth remembering as something other than a preamble. Because even if another, future version proves more successful, none will be more true—more truly bad when he's bad, and more honestly and steadfastly great when he's great.

Update: On Thursday, the Tigers announced that they traded David Price to the Toronto Blue Jays.