Rays' Price is proof of new trend that favors pitchers

Not so many years ago there was a cry throughout the land that pitching was a forgotten art. There was legitimate debate whether baseball should add teams through expansion because many learned people in this grande olde game believed there weren't enough big-league arms out there to stock additional clubs.

It seems laughable now to recall that argument in a year in which there already have been four no-hitters and two perfect games; three perfectos actually, if you're willing to overlook the Joyceian asterisk attached to Armando Galarraga's should-have-been perfect effort.

So against that backdrop, David Price of your Tampa Bay Rays steps to the mound tonight as the starting pitcher in the All-Star Game at Angel Stadium. In the year of the pitcher, Price and his National League counterpart, Ubaldo Jimenez of Colorado, are perhaps the best examples of how dramatic the change has been in baseball.

"He has really put together not only a combination of his stuff, but learning how to pitch," Rays third baseman Evan Longoria said of Price. "He has really come into his own as a pitcher.

"I think it's the same way as the guy he's going to be throwing against, Jimenez. They both have electric stuff and have really, really turned it up a notch as far as making pitches and being able to get out jams."

Just two years ago Price was one of six guys sharing a two-bedroom apartment with teammates at Double-A Montgomery. We've have seen Price, now a whopping 24 years old, do amazing things in barely a year and a half in majors.

As a rookie, he closed out the 2008 American League Championship Series against Boston, then pitched in the World Series. We've seen him streak to a 12-4 start with a 2.42 ERA this season. Then we stop and think: No Rays pitcher has won more than 14 games in a single season.

Jimenez is a ridiculous 15-1 with a 2.20 ERA this season and he has one of those no-hitters. Then you start thinking about some of the other pitchers in this game, guys like Florida's Josh Johnson, Boston's Clay Buchholz and Jon Lester, and Phil Hughes of the Yankees. And we haven't even mentioned Stephen Strasburg.

We know about Jeff Niemann with the Rays, just in his second season. We see young Jeremy Hellickson in the minors at Durham and we figure he'll be joining this group soon enough.

"You see so many young kids that are pitching at such a high level. It seems that we have a ton of them in our division, and it doesn't just stop with David Price," AL manager Joe Girardi said. "You look at Buchholz, who was here, the whole staff in Tampa, Ricky Romero; it just seems to be one after another in our division. I think it's the time of the pitcher right now."

The trend is undeniable.

The collective National League ERA is in its fourth consecutive year of decline and is on pace to be the lowest since 1995, while the AL is headed toward its lowest total since 1992.

Part of that could be stiff penalties for steroid violations, which most people concede has forced players to make better choices. But it's also true that pitchers are coming into the majors now better prepared than ever.

"Even in Triple-A now there are teams that have video you can watch. Kids coming up to the major leagues already have a feel for what they do. The technology is better than it even was three or four years ago," Buchholz said.

"It's getting pretty good for the guys throwing the ball now. It'll probably shift and come back to where guys are hitting home runs, but it's good to be a pitcher right now."

It's good to be David Price tonight - well, most any night actually. It's easy to forget that expectations for him were nearly on the Strasburg scale when he joined the Rays in the middle of the 2008 pennant run. Maybe if he played in a market with a little more electricity for baseball, they would have been.

But no matter. He certainly has been everything the Rays expected, and at such a young age it's easy to let the mind drift to thoughts of what else he might do.

"My goals are set higher than this," he said. "I don't want to just stop with this right here."

There's little chance of that happening. After all, this is David Price we're talking about. Even in the year of the pitcher, someone has to be the pitcher. For the Rays and in the American League, Price is that guy.