David Price’s Red Sox career from the day he inked a 7-year, $217 million contract with the team has been a bumpy one ever since. When Boston signed one of the best arms in all of baseball, he was expected to help lead the team to the playoffs and remain the perennial Cy Young Award contender that he was before he arrived in Boston. His first year wasn’t necessarily a disappointment, but it wasn’t necessarily good, either. He had a near 4.00 ERA and was extremely inconsistent. He had unnatural spurts of pure dominance or pure inferiority. When the Red Sox did eventually make the playoffs, the one start that he got in Game 2 against the Cleveland Indians was brutal, going only 3.1 innings and allowing five runs in the loss, extending his list of winless postseason starts.
Fast forward to 2017, the Red Sox’ starting rotation consisting of Porcello, Sale and Price was expected to be one of the best in all of Major League Baseball. Just a couple of weeks into spring training, Price went down after experiencing elbow discomfort and just returned to the team a little over two weeks ago. Mix all of that with half of Red Sox fans labeling Price as mentally weak and soft, incapable of succeeding in such a big market like Boston and can’t handle the pressure here, you have a recipe for disaster. That’s the only way to describe his journey with the team thus far.
On Wednesday night after the Red Sox lost to the Yankees in the Bronx, things took an unexpected turn for the worst in the clubhouse. To begin, Price first asked to speak privately with CSNNE’s Evan Drellich. Drellich had recently tweeted a quote from an article written by Dan Shaughnessy that included Price talking about how he now refuses to speak with the media from this point forward. Price blatantly said that he plans on only speaking to reporters on days that he pitches. “…but I was honest with everything they asked me last year, and I get blown up for that. So they did this to themselves. Talk to me on the day I pitch, and that’s it. There are no more personal interviews. There is no more asking me questions on a personal level. That’s done,” Price said in the column. Drellich, being a beat reporter for the team, questioned Price’s decision on Twitter, and apparently Price saw it.
This is presumably the reason why he wanted to speak with Drellich personally.
When I say that they spoke, that’s pretty misleading. Just a few seconds after the two of them closed the door behind them to ‘speak’, things got ugly. The two of them quickly went at it and were heard yelling at each other for a couple of minutes. When Price exited the room, he said “Write whatever the f— you want. Just write it. Whatever the f— you want.” Soon enough, after both of them were finished behind closed doors, they went back at it again publicly in the clubhouse. Even after most of the media had left, Price was heard still cursing, and repeatedly saying “F— them! F— them all. All of them.”
No matter whose side you’re on or how you view this, it’s a bad look for Price. We all know that relationships between athletes and the media are typically tense, especially in Boston, as you can tell. No matter how much money you make or how famous or talented you are, if you hear that someone wrote or said something bad about you, you’ll most likely take it personally and think about it for a while and nothing more than to prove them wrong. The day that he first joined the Red Sox, you knew things weren’t going to be pretty, but I don’t think that anyone expected it to go to such great lengths. Like Price said, the media essentially did this to themselves. Some may call this total shut out “over the top”, but when you put things into perspective and look at the entire situation as a whole, it isn’t all that wild. The infamously critical and harsh Boston market paired with a player like David Price who has a terrible postseason resume and is notoriously mentally soft isn’t going to mix well, and virtually had no chance of mixing well.
It isn’t just the media who rags on Price in their columns, it’s Red Sox fans online and in person, too. The beat reporters and writers are the lone link between the player speaking/answering questions and the fans reading what they’re saying. So-and-so is talking with the player in the clubhouse, hears a quote they know they can write a piece on, typically spins it and/or makes it sound worse than it actually is, the fans read it and promptly get on him about it. If you were in Price’s shoes, it’d be hard not to get fed up with the media, too.
While not every writer is out to get him, he knows that whatever he says will be taken out of context or written the wrong way and tons of fans will scream at him about it. Nobody deserves that. This has been Price’s Boston career in a nutshell, if we’re being honest.
As you may have guessed, many fans aren’t too thrilled with Price’s decision to completely shut out the media once and for all. Some of his recent actions and words kind of foreshadowed him doing this. Red Sox fans have always gotten on Price for every single thing he’s ever done while donning “Red Sox” across his chest, and they probably always will. Keep in mind, it actually isn’t that uncommon for starting pitchers to refuse to speak to reporters on days that they’re not pitching. Players in this unique situation only ever do one of two things: continue dealing with all of the daily bullshit or totally shut everybody on the outside, well, out. Even if you disagree with Price’s abrupt decision to do this, you have to understand where he’s coming from to some degree.
At first, I used to get on Price for being mentally soft and I was constantly irritated by the way he treated the media and fans, and his overall attitude towards everything. As the days and months have passed by and more spats like this have occurred, I’ve started thinking about his reasoning behind his actions and words, and it’s all starting to make sense. It’s cliche, but journalists, reporters, writers, all of those people are somewhat evil, let alone those in Boston. We scream at Price for being mentally weak and not being able to handle the pressure over here, but he has good reason to be paranoid about what’s being written and said about him, in my opinion. Everything he says and does will forever be criticized by the outside, and at some point, you’re simply not going to be able to handle it any longer.
The media will always spin words said by any player; reporters don’t discriminate. But it’s much different with Price, unfortunately. It’s legitimately sad to see such a talented athlete have to keep everybody out so he doesn’t have to hear it anymore, no matter how mentally soft they are. At some point, we all need to accept the fact that Price allows things to get to his head easily. He’s the perfect bait for writers to whip up their articles about what he said or how he acted after a bad start or what have you: his voice always sounds sad, he’s always pissed at everybody, he hasn’t won when it matters most, he has yet to live up to expectations here, etc, etc, etc. What I find amazing is that Price has said multiple times that he doesn’t plan on opting out of his contract with Boston after the 2018 season and that he plans on pitching here for the full seven years. The narrative has been for a year and a half now that Price can’t handle Boston, but that’s seemingly wildly incorrect. Him almost entirely shutting out the media will only help him achieve that personal goal of his to stick to his guns through the next few years and make it out alive after 2022; all he has to do now is pitch well and win a playoff start, which he is more than capable of doing, now more than ever.
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