The Blue Jays Should Not Use David Price Today

Last night, the Blue Jays beat the Rangers 5-1 to extend the ALCS to a fourth game, keeping their season alive for at least one more day. But while the final score wasn’t particularly close, the Blue Jays did feel a bit of pressure in the seventh inning, when Marco Estrada gave up back to back singles with just one out and Rougned Odor coming to the plate. Odor didn’t represent the tying run, but the Jfays have seen him do enough damage to know that he was one swing away from making the game extremely tense again, and so, John Gibbons began to warm David Price in the bullpen. Without Brett Cecil, the team’s bullpen is thin on quality left-handers, and Gibbons wanted his ace to be prepared to put out a fire if need be.

Aaron Loup got Odor to ground out to short, and then Mark Lowe came in and struck out Robinson Chirinos, so Price ended up not pitching in last night’s game. But if Loup had failed to retire Odor, Price was apparently the man Gibbons was going to to turn to, even with three straight right-handed hitters due up. Per Arden Zwelling from Sportsnet:

Here are the situations that would have led to the 30-year-old Cy Young winner making his first relief appearance since 2010, according to the man himself:

In the bottom of the seventh inning, if Aaron Loup had not retired Rougned Odor, Price would have come in to face Robinson Chirinos and any subsequent batters in the inning.

In the bottom of the eighth, if Hanser Alberto and Delino DeShields reached base against Aaron Sanchez, Price would have come in to face Shin-Soo Choo, Prince Fielder and Mitch Moreland.

In the bottom of the ninth, if Roberto Osuna had gotten into any kind of trouble, Price would have come in to save or lose the game.

Price stayed hot throughout all three of those innings but said after the game he doesn’t think that will affect his ability to pitch in Monday’s Game 4 or a potential fifth game back in Toronto. He was slated to throw a short side session Monday night regardless, and if the series does go five games, he’ll more than likely get that Wednesday start at Rogers Centre.

The Blue Jays can’t lose again in this series, and putting your ace on the mound to stave off elimination is a perfectly natural reaction. Tonight, though, I’d suggest that Gibbons should resist the urge, and give David Price the night off.

The Blue Jays have to win today in order to force a deciding game on Wednesday, and with R.A. Dickey starting, the team is likely to go all-hands on deck again. But the goal isn’t really to just maximize the team’s probability of winning today; the goal is to advance to the next round, and to keep their chances at a championship alive. While getting one more game is nice, the Blue Jays season will ultimately not be viewed any differently if they’re eliminated in four or five games in the ALDS; the outcome that the team is pushing for is winning both today and Wednesday.

The team’s best chance of winning on Wednesday is to have David Price on the mound, on full rest. While pitchers can and do throw effectively on diminished rest, historically, they perform worse. After warming up (and staying hot for three innings) last night, it is highly unlikely that Price could throw in game action today and still be at full rest for his start on Wednesday. We don’t have the ability to quantify the negative impact of throwing between starts, especially with the variable of him getting warm last night as well, but pitchers have made it clear that warming up takes its toll on their endurance.

Using Price today will likely reduce the team’s chances of winning on Wednesday, by some margin. We don’t know that margin is, and we can’t say exactly how much worse Price should be expected to pitch, but we can suggest that there’s some game five penalty to be paid for using him in game four. And given that the team needs to win both games, the Blue Jays should be making decisions that increase their odds of winning both today and Wednesday, instead of simply maximizing their survival today while limiting their chances of advancing to the ALCS.

The benefit of using Price today has to be weighed against the cost of likely getting less from him in two days, but also, it has to be weighed against the expected performance of the non-Price relievers the team would use today. If the team’s bullpen was in shambles, this would be a different story, but the Blue Jays bullpen is actually quite good and deep, even without Cecil. And Marcus Stroman is available in the starter-throwing-in-relief role, giving the team an extra weapon to bridge the gap from Dickey through the end of the game; Stroman isn’t scheduled to pitch again until Friday (if the team advances), so using him today comes with a much lower cost than using Price.

But it’s not just Stroman’s availability that makes me suggest the Jays give Price the day off; it’s the fact that R.A. Dickey is starting for the Blue Jays today. No, I don’t expect that Dickey’s going to revert to the unhittable Cy Young form he showed in New York back in 2012, but he doesn’t have to. The Blue Jays can plan on getting on four or five innings from Dickey and still expect quality work the rest of the game, as his knuckleball creates an advantage for the relievers who come in after him. This has been dubbed The R.A. Dickey Effect.

In 2013, Chris Carruthers showed that pitchers who entered the game after Dickey experienced significant performance improvements relative to their pitching in games where they relieved non-Dickey pitchers. Here is the image of the table Carruthers included in his post two years ago.

aD is the numbers of innings pitched after Dickey, and naD is the number of innings pitched after other starting pitchers, and you can see the difference in results between them in the other categories to the right of that. 11% more strikeouts. 8% fewer walks. 5% fewer homers. These are not insignificant changes, and it turns out that during those years, the pitchers who pitched after Dickey were often highly effective, even if they weren’t always effective pitching on other days.

A month ago, Shi Davidi looked at the Dickey Effect on the 2015 Blue Jays, and found similar results this year as well; relievers after Dickey posted a 3.33 ERA/3.76 FIP, while their season numbers put them at a 3.77 ERA/4.04 FIP. In working on the piece, Davidi talked to Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker about the potential for a carryover after Dickey leaves the game, and Walker said this:

“I think there’s something to it and that’s just based on the naked eye, watching it and talking to other hitters and knowing what it does to you during the course of that game,” says pitching coach Pete Walker. “Hitters hate it. You’ll see some good hitters over the course of the season, depending on what kind of game it is, they might not be in the lineup. But it definitely disrupts their timing, they don’t like hitting knuckleballs and there’s a reason, it takes them a little bit to get back to that rhythm of seeing a hard slider, and a sinker and a four-seam fastball.

“Maybe it doesn’t show in the numbers sometimes, but it definitely affects them mentally, too.”

There’s enough evidence for the Dickey Effect at this point that this is a variable that should be accounted for, and so even with the Jays lacking a dominant left-handed weapon out of the bullpen without Cecil, we have to raise our expectations of the performance of the Jays non-Dickey pitchers today. And while Price would benefit from the post-knuckleball hangover as well, the fact that all of the Jays relievers are made more effective because of today’s starting pitcher should give Gibbons more confidence in trusting them than he would on Wednesday.

If you throw Price today, then it’s more likely you’re going to have to lean on your relievers to help get through Wednesday’s game, and those relievers would be used in a situation where they wouldn’t get the benefit of Dickey’s knuckleball having set them up for success. Instead of using their ace to pitch the innings in which their relievers are most likely to perform well, it’s probably better for the Jays chances to win the series if the team saves Price for a longer outing in game five, giving their relievers an easier match-up in game four after Dickey leaves.

Dickey for four or five innings, then Stroman for two or three, depending on how things have gone, then some combination of Loup, Lowe, Liam Hendriks, Aaron Sanchez and Roberto Osuna. Yeah, that’s a lot of right-handed pitching to go up against the Rangers line-up that leans to the left side, but today, those lefties are likely to be less effective than normal because they had to deal with the knuckleball in the first few innings. Rather than using Price’s bullets today, let the righties (and Loup) try and win today’s game, and then throw a full-strength Price at the Rangers in game five.

The Jays have to win today, but they don’t only have to win today, and saving Price may very well give them a better chance of advancing to the ALCS than using him this afternoon.