What’s Behind David Price’s Postseason Struggles?
David Price can’t pitch in the postseason, maybe you’ve heard. It’s a decent 56.2 inning sample at this point, but it’s just a little bit more than a month’s worth of work. He’s had six worse months in his career.
Still, to be fair to the hand-wringing, if he had a month with a 4.10 FIP, we’d be talking about it here as well. So let’s try to look at why David Price has struggled in the postseason. Because his regular and post-season strikeouts minus walks are almost identical, it’s obviously about the home runs. His home run rate in the postseason is 77% higher than it is in the regular season!
And there’s a little something to this. A combination of a couple little things — one in his control, one not — may have lead to more home runs in the postseason than he’s seen in the regular season.
Look at his pitching mix, regular season and postseason.
| Pitch | Regular Season | Postseason |
| Four-Seamer | 35% | 28% |
| Two-Seamer | 28% | 30% |
| Change | 14% | 21% |
| Cutter | 8% | 16% |
| Knuckle Curve | 6% | 4% |
So Price throws fewer four-seamers in the postseason. So what. There are a few good fastball hitters in the postseason, after all. And are seven fewer four-seamers really going to matter in a 900-pitch sample really going to matter?
Maybe. Check out his home run rate per pitch, regular season and postseason (just for kicks).
| Pitch | HR% Reg Season | HR% Postseason |
| Four-Seamer | 0.45% | 0.70% |
| Two-Seamer | 0.62% | 1.38% |
| Change | 0.67% | 0.90% |
| Cutter | 0.60% | 2.06% |
| Curve | 0.62% | 0.00% |
So Price throws fewer four-seamers in the post-season, and the four-seamer is the pitch that has given up the fewest homers for his career. Using his big-sample regular season numbers, how many fewer homers could he have expected to give up if he had thrown four-seamers like he does regularly? .1. .1 homers. That’s not even a whole number.
Now, let’s look at his opponents. He’s surely facing better opponents in the postseason, maybe that’s part of it.
| David Price Opponents, Regular Season vs Post Season | ||
| Stat | Regular Season | Post Season |
| wRC+ | 101 | 104 |
| OPS | 0.742 | 0.767 |
| HR/FB | 10.7% | 11.4% |
Yes, the opponents are slightly better in the postseason. They hit more home runs, too.
For his career, Price’s regular season opponents have averaged a 10.7% home run per fly ball rate, and he’s allowed a 9% HR/FB rate. If he kept that same ratio against his postseason opponents, they “should” have seen a 9.8% HR/FB rate. Instead, they saw a 14.3% HR/FB rate. He “should” have given up 6.1 homers, but instead, he gave up nine.
Between the two approaches, it looks like Price should have given up six home runs instead of nine. If you called them all two-run shots, you should take a full run off of Price’s ERA. He’d still have a 4.29 ERA, but maybe we wouldn’t be hearing about how he struggles in the postseason.
30-year-old David Price has pitched a little more than a month combined in the postseason. It hasn’t been a great month, and that’s partially because of his pitching mix, and partially because he’s facing better hitters. It’s still not something he can’t turn around with a few good starts.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
He’s playing a team of destiny, the KC Royals. http://twtwsports.blogspot.com/2015/10/twtws-2015-alds-preview.html
A team of destiny? Well weren’t they all just a week ago? http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/eye-on-baseball/25342089/team-of-destiny-blue-jays-conquer-crazy-inning-with-well-built-roster
It’s probably a sarcastic comment judging by the user name (TWTW = The Will To Win).
Why the downvotes, did anyone actually click the link?
Is there any velocity / movement correlation or different clustering? Adrenaline causing him to throwing 2 seamers / cutters harder may reduce separation and timing differences making him easier to square up. Or maybe it affects movement due to release point.
I think a lot of his struggles are just he’s been brutal vs Texas. He struggled in 2 starts before he was a Jay, he struggled vs them in one start, and his RP appearance wasn’t good. He was good against Baltimore, bad in one start vs Boston, and his KC start was a gem until Goins dropped the ball in the 7th and they collapsed.
During the regular season he’s also struggled during Texas. I imagine this has a lot to do with his post season struggles more than anything else. Texas just seems to have his number.
You’re assuming, incorrectly, that there’s a meaningful, sharp distinction between Price’s 2 and 4 seams. There isn’t. PITCHf/X draws an arbitrary line in the middle of an undifferentiated cluster of fastballs and declared that on one side is 2-seamers, the other is 4-seamers. You could draw the arbitrary line a half-inch of pfx_x over and get different answers. Which points to the likely real answer. If you only see a difference when you draw a meaningless, arbitrary line at a random point, there’s probably no real difference. He was unlucky, and because we hate the idea of bad luck and love to find patterns, we go and find pseudo-explanations.
Even if you add the fastballs together, he’s been throwing fewer fastballs. And saying that .1 HR difference is probably not the explanation is not really adding much to the discourse.
*Even if you add the fastballs together, he’s been throwing fewer fastballs.*
Not so, not this year at least. His fastball usage in the post-season is pretty much in line with his last couple months of the season (when he had excellent results).
The pitch that PITCHf/x calls his two-seam has had dramatically worse results in this post-season (13.4 hits/100 pitches, 20.9 bases per 100 pitches) than during the regular season (6.2/9.1), so focusing on home runs is missing the point; there is a dramatic and meaningful difference in the regular vs. post-season in 2015.
But many of those hits came on what seem to be pretty good pitches, there’s no evidence that the pitch is intrinsically worse, and, most importantly, PITCHf/x is identifying pitches based on arbitrary distinctions.
Maybe there is a problem. Maybe his pitch selection, or sequencing, or specific location for specific batters, is off. But the simplest explanation is that he’s been unlucky.
Here’s what I don’t get.
Every pitch classification is somewhat arbitrarily drawn. There’s obviously two fastballs here
https://public.tableau.com/views/PriceFastballs/Sheet1?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&:showTabs=y
and it’s the only real difference over the bigger sample of his entire postseason experience, is fewer fastballs and more changeups, cutters.
So I discarded pitch selection as a reason.
Then I found that strength of competition wasn’t all of it either, and even sort of defined the effect of luck by pointing out the difference in HR/FB controlling between the regular and postseasons.
So, as I said in the first comment, the ‘luck’ hand wave is implicit in my lack of a conclusion, and in my second point, and isn’t adding anything. I could do the luck hand wave in a ton of articles, it’s just not an interesting thing to write.
“He was unlucky, and because we hate the idea of bad luck and love to find patterns, we go and find pseudo-explanations.”
Congratulations for not reading the article! Eno Saris makes very clear that the differences in pitch selection can’t explain so many home runs.
Congratulations on missing the point! When you take PITCHf/x at its word on pitch identification on Price’s 2- and 4-seamers, you can’t say anything about pitch selection, because PITCHf/x is just guessing.
The 3D pitchf/x chart in your article is an incredibly clear explanation of what you’re saying.
he had trouble pitching inside versus Texas with a couple hit batters
He wasn’t even bad this post season other than the Texas start (which he started on like 10 days rest).
Why does the regular season side of the pitching mix table only add up to 91%? Is there another pitch or a typo?
My understanding is that clutch hitting or clutch pitching isn’t a thing. But I’ve heard somewhere that anti-clutch performances can be a thing. If true, maybe that explains David Price.
This post season, There were comments out of KC, that Price was tipping his pitches, particularly the change up. Maybe Texas picked up on the same thing. It was also questionable whether or not one of the HRs was actually an HR