“Hey, that’s not one of our pitchers!” is something you might find yourself saying on Tuesday evening when the Tigers take on the Yankees in the second game of their four game set. And you’d sort of be right. David Price will be pitching for the Tigers and he hasn’t even thrown a pitch for the Tigers in his career. He’s new to the fold, courtesy of last minute deal that sent Austin Jackson, Drew Smyly, and Willy Adames to various corners of the country. Let’s get to know his game.

History

David Price has been very good for his entire career. He’s about to turn 29 years old and is in his 5th full season in the big leagues and has basically been a 4.0 WAR guy every year since 2010. He’s durable and pitches deep into games. He went to Vandy, so that makes him extra Tigers-y.

2014

Price is having his best season to date. Don’t let anyone tell you differently because his ERA isn’t as low as 2012. Price is running a career best strikeout rate (27%) and a career low walk rate (3.3%). He’s giving up a few too many home runs, but they aren’t killing him by any stretch of the imagination. He’s sporting a 3.11 ERA, 2.94 FIP, and 2.73 xFIP over 170 innings of work. That’s a 3.9 fWAR and 3.0 RA9-WAR. Anyway you slice it, he’s been very good this year.

Projection

Price figures to be just about as good as he’s been all year for the next two months according to both Steamer and ZiPS projections. They expect a small amount of negative regression in the strikeout and walk rates but a little positive regression in the home run department, so his overall ERA and FIP numbers look pretty steady the rest of the way.

Repertoire

Price uses three fastball variants; four-seam, sinker, and cutter; and calls on a changeup and curveball as well. He’s around 94 with the four-seamer and sinker and drops down to about 89-90 with the cutter. The change works around 86 and the breaking ball shows up in the low 80s. He doesn’t have a significant platoon split this season, but has a pretty standard 40 points wOBA split for his career, which you would expect from a power lefty with a solid changeup. He’s very good against lefties but he’s also very good against righties.

Impact

This is a slightly superfluous post because you guys know who David Price is. You know he was the Rays’ ace. You’ve seen him dominate. He pitches deep into games and he’s extremely effective from the left side. He’s probably a win or a win and half better than Smyly the rest of the way and not only is that going to show up directly, but he should take some pressure off the bullpen and offer few chances for the lesser arms out there to get into the game considering that he’s averaging about 7.4 innings per start.

Ultimately, Price is a known quantity and it should be a lot of fun to watch him pitch for the Tigers.

Yesterday, the Tigers traded Austin Jackson. While this was good news because it made the team better, it was also sad news because Austin was a big part of the team for the last five years. I was planning to offer a nice tribute to Jackson’s time in Detroit today centered around his best moments.

Then, some jerk named HookSlide at Bless You Boys did that exact thing!

I’m kidding of course. HookSlide went ahead and made up for his idea-theft by locating and packaging some wonderful Dan Dickerson calls of big Austin Jackson moments for publication here at New English D. Hook and I share a fondness for Dan as a play by play guy, so it makes sense to showcase that here. So big thanks to HookSlide, Dan, and Austin on this one.

*****

I was skeptical when the Tigers traded for Jackson. This was a long time ago in internet years. It was 2009 and the Tigers were dumping salary after a really poor year in the ledger. I didn’t think Scherzer was ever going to be a star, but man did he work at it. And I had see Jackson play a little in AAA and didn’t see anything special in that regard either.

Truth be told, Austin Jackson was not a special player. He’s a good player who had one really great season and a few very nice ones in Detroit. He has an average bat and used to have a great glove. The glove is more like average now and he’s more of a regular than any type of star. So I was basically right about Jackson, but only by accident. Forgive me, that was before FanGraphs was popular and you could get detailed scouting information by sneezing on Twitter.

At any rate, for this reason, I was slow to warm up to Jackson. It wasn’t personal, but Granderson was a favorite of mine and it was hard to separate the two. But he was a Tigers and he’s a good guy and there’s really nothing else that matters to me when it comes to welcoming a player in.

I could write about Jackson’s saga, but I think I’d rather just share the moments that made his time in Detroit special. These aren’t all inclusive because the archives only allow you so much access. But here you go, Austin Jackson’s time as a Tiger through the voice of the game’s best non-Vin Scully voice.

 *****

Note: Having some trouble embedding them, but the links work for now!

Let’s warm up with a nice inside the park home run.

Did you know that Jackson dove a couple times? No really.

And how about his big playoff home run in 2012?

And who could forget this season defining play in 2011?

And, of course the defining moment of his Tigers career. Saving Galarraga’s perfect game…

That is, of course, until Thursday. I’m not one for emotions, but this one made you feel things. Watching Austin leave the field like this was certainly something I’ll remember for a long time.

We’ll miss you, Austin.

I wasn’t a fan of the Tigers’ offseason strategy – that won’t surprise anyone who reads the site regularly. Up to that point, Dombrowski had made very few missteps as the Tigers’ GM, but he didn’t impress me this winter. Well he nailed the deadline…or he almost nailed it, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The Tigers needed to upgrade in order to be a true playoff contender. The biggest opportunity for that upgrade was in the bullpen, the second biggest was in the outfield.

The bullpen came first with the Tigers nabbing the best reliever on the market in Joakim Soria. Dave paid a steep price by losing Corey Knebel and Jake Thompson, but those players weren’t going to contribute until at least 2015 and Thompson was probably not coming until 2016. The price was high, but the future matters much less to the Tigers than to the average club, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The Tigers need to do more, though. And then Oakland pushed the chips in and grabbed Jon Lester this morning. The AL rival isn’t messing around and the Tigers needed to follow suit. For a while, Andrew Miller seemed like a nice option to upgrade the bullpen, but Dave had other ideas.

Enter David Price and the Rays. The best player on the market and one who is under team control for 2015 as well. The Tigers had holes in the bullpen, but adding to the roster is adding to the roster. An extra win in the rotation will do the trick just like one in the bullpen would. At least for the regular season.

Not only did Dombrowski grab an upgrade for the stretch run, but he replaced Scherzer for 2015. Great. The upgrade is a little offset considering that the Tigers had to give up Smyly to do it. They also lost Jackson. And a very nice prospect. Price is an upgrade over Jackson and Smyly for the rest of the year and probably next season as well. It will cost them in the checkbook, but they have plenty of room to carry Price in that regard. Adames could really help the Tigers in 2017 or 2018, but that’s a long way off. He’s the cost of doing business.

Price makes them a near lock to wrap up the division and makes them even better in the postseason. Maybe getting three relievers instead of a reliever and a starter would be better in the postseason, but Price makes them better than they were otherwise. And then he helps next year too.

Theoretically, the Tigers could have done something better than this, but this was the Tigers grabbing the best two players they could.

So what we have is the Tigers giving up six years of Knebel, six years of Thompson, six years of Adames, four plus years of Smyly, and a year plus of Jackson for a year plus of both Soria and Price.That’s a high cost but it’s one that makes them more likely to win the 2014 World Series and probably the 2015 World Series. And everything after that doesn’t matter.

Let me say that again. Everything after 2015 doesn’t matter. This is the window. Cabrera and Verlander are getting older. Scherzer is leaving. Porcello might be gone after next year. Kinsler won’t be this good forever. The Tigers are going to have a shot this year and next and then they’re going to have to retool. That might only take a year, but it also might take five. And the owner doesn’t care. He’s getting older and wants a winner. The general manager has done just about all he can do in this job except win a title.

This is it. It really is. So the Tigers borrowed from the future to go for it now. And they should have. And they added two great players and I’m excited for the showdown in October.

The only thing Dombrowski got wrong was not going bigger. He could have gotten Miller too. Or Koji. Or Glen Perkins. Or something. Dave made the team better and he did it the right way. My only gripe is that he probably should have thrown two more good prospects at a team to get one more piece. Because it’s now or never. Dave almost nailed it, but he still did one heck of a job. Nothing is going to match what he did in 2011 or in the 2008 offseason, but this might be the one big deal that puts a trophy on Mike Illitch’s mantle.

Money be damned, future be damned. This is it.