On that note, I’m much more inclined to use the research that others are doing on Price as a jumping off point for my analysis, because their work is so in-depth and of high quality that it would be silly to attempt to do them one better. The best way to think about it is that I’m jumping into an ongoing conversation without really trying to start one on my own.

With that in mind, I’ll start by jumping in on Chris Towers’s buy-low fantasy column on David Price from yesterday, with the caveat that I find fantasy analysis as good or better than quote-unquote “real” analysis, and don’t make a distinction between the two. Baseball is baseball and David Price is David Price whether he’s making outs for the Red Sox or Luke Chatelain in TDGX.

Towers makes a slate of great points, but starts by noting the sheer strangeness of Price’s numbers so far:

First, it’s worth noting just how weird Price’s start to the season has been. On the plus side, he’s averaging more than six innings per start, and leads the majors in strikeouts with 49. On the negative side, he also leads the majors in hits (38) and earned runs (25). That’s not exactly what you would expect, and should be your first sign that this slow start isn’t necessarily representative of, well, anything.

I probably disagree that it’s representative of nothing, but that’s not a criticism, because the information on which I’m going is from later in the same column. Long story short, while Price has been knocked around pretty hard at times, pretty much every other time someone has put the wood on the ball it’s basically amounted to a piffle:

One thing that is interesting is, while Price ranks just 68th among 205 pitchers in average batted ball exit velocity, per BaseballSavant.com, he has the 14th-highest exit velocity on line drives or flyballs. Once again, on those rare occasions when batters have been able to square up to Price’s pitches, they’ve been able to drive them with authority. And, of course, when batters aren’t really squaring him up, they are hitting dribblers — he has the 19th-lowest exit velocity on groundballs.

So why the spike in hard-hit balls? Towers doesn’t say, which is probably the right thing to do in a situation so obviously dominated by the tyranny of small sample sizes — and as many people have noted, it’s somewhat par for the course at this time of year:

David Price, month by month breakdown over his entire career. #RedSox pic.twitter.com/0AYnxOOdsY

— Joon Lee (@iamjoonlee) May 2, 2016

Some of this might get back to what I wrote about last time, when Price said that he had trouble ramping up the velocity in the cold weather, but while Price’s velocity is down across the board, his strikeouts are way up. In regards to his velocity being down, it’s not because he can’t reach the high marks when he needs to — he hit 96 against the Braves, per Brooks, en route to this…

David Price has tied a career-high with 14 strikeouts against the Braves, with 7 of them swinging. pic.twitter.com/Fq9yZFpqct

— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) April 27, 2016

… but that the baseline seems to have been pushed downward. For all the talk about his slow Aprils, Price is solidly below even his historical early-season velocities thus far:

Let’s just say that I’d be surprised if Price was able to sustain average velocities comparable to those for which he has renowned, but I consider it beside the point. At no point were the Sox signing a 27-year-old Price. If the small sample of Price’s performance thus far is potentially indicative of anything, it’s that of a pitcher coming to grips (literally, ha) with a declining skill set, and figuring out how to use it to his advantage. That is, of course, if you buy the dip in velocity. The ProJo’s Tim Britton says that it might be premature:

If we look at Price’s recent history, he has had similar difficulty reaching his peak velocity in the first month of the season. In both 2014 and 2015, Price’s average fastball velocity was lower than it was in the summer months.

This jives with manager John Farrell’s belief that it takes power pitchers the first month of the regular season to reach their maximum arm strength. Price has exhibited no concern about his velocity, and he was throwing 95 in the eighth inning in his last start against the Braves. With first-pitch temperature at 46 degrees at Fenway on Sunday night, it’s not surprising he couldn’t dial it up quite as much.

There will indeed come a time when Price’s velocity diminishes, and it wouldn’t be a shock if it happened this season. But he’s prepared for that adjustment by pre-emptively adding to his repertoire over the past few seasons, and there’s no reason he can’t be an ace throwing 93 rather than 95.

I think he’s going to be the ace throwing 93 as soon as this year, but Britton is right-on when he says he can make it work. In some lights, he has made it work already, but it’s just not showing up on the score sheet. Britton cribbed from his own column to post this eye-popper on Twitter:

(Price’s FIP is 8th in AL, ahead of Sale. His K/9 is first. His LOB% is ridiculously low and will normalize. Conclusion: He’ll be fine.)

— Tim Britton (@TimBritton) May 2, 2016

That’s pretty reassuring, as is the fact that the Sox are in first place despite Price’s struggles, but it isn’t all roses, of course. Why is Price struggling? As Britton notes, he’s getting plastered when he leaves fastballs up in the zone, as he did to A-Rod on Sunday night. Historically he’s gotten pummeled on his curveball from time to time, only to reign it back in, but the fastball hasn’t been a problem, even early in the season:

All of which is to say that something new is happening, and while it may be attributed to a small sample size, it might just be the new reality of Price. We’ll have to wait and see if the velocity in fact bumps back up (and in so doing, if those elevated fastballs become K’s instead of four-baggers) and his stats at Fenway normalize. Like Towers, Lee and Britton, I think it will happen to a degree with which we can all be comfortable, so predictions like this stop coming true:

A Yankee lineup with Ronald Torreyes and Austin Romine vs. David Price. That has to be a reverse lock for seven runs, right?

— Bryan Hoch (@BryanHoch) May 1, 2016

That’s spooky, and I’m sufficiently scared enough to end the column here. But I’m not scared about Price. April showers bring May flowers, and it’s time for him to bloom.

Send me your Price anecdotes/hate mail @bryanjoiner

Photo by Bob DeChiara/USA Today Sports Images

I’m getting ahead of myself. Even before you account for Price’s whopping paycheck, it’s a wonder that he’s in Boston at all. We’re used to watching big-ticket players ply their trade for the Sox, but not since Manny Ramirez — another No. 24 — has a player come onstage quite like Price, and just like Manny’s signing, it signals something of a tectonic shift in Major League Baseball. In almost every way, Price, like Ramirez before him, has been the prototypical Yankees signing and Boston enemy-for-life right up until signing with the Olde Town Team. For Price, it goes straight to his position, size and build, which evokes Yankees big-ticket purchases Randy Johnson and CC Sabathia. If you close your eyes, it’s easy to see Price in pinstripes.

And why not? He’s always been an enemy. Price made his first big-stage appearance in the 2008 ALCS, in which he closed out Game 7 against Boston, and has logged more innings against the Sox in his career than he has against any other team that is not the Yankees.  He has yakked at David Ortiz. He bounced from one Sox rival to another, from Tampa Bay (who may be more hated by younger fans than the Yankees), former division rivals Detroit (who left the AL East in 1995) and north-of-the-border rivals Toronto (who were dead as a doornail for decades until Price showed up). He even beef-flirted with Sox writer Jared Carrabis on Twitter, repeatedly.

Price chose us as much as we chose him, and he knows that the Boston media will put him under a microscope. This column is that microscope.

Mostly, though, he was good, and shut down the Sox pretty handily. His 3.08 ERA against the team is a single hundredth of a point away from his 3.09 mark heading into the season, and he’s 104-56 against everyone and 11-6 against the Sox. Given that creepy symmetry, if anyone knows who he is, it’s us, and Price knows who we are, probably better than we do. He chose us as much as we chose him, and he knows that the Boston media will put him under a microscope. This column is that microscope. Welcome to Price Check — a biweekly deep-dive on the new de facto face of the franchise.

All that said, this column does not exist to hold Price to task for his tanks of money. There will be much discussion of whether he’s “earning” that money elsewhere, but not here. In my opinion, he earned it by getting to the point where he signed his name on the contract, at which point the money was his, be his ERA 2.20 or 5.50. That is all anyone ever has had to do, full stop. Squabbling over whether it’s a “good deal” for the Sox going forward ignores the fact that the Sox’s financial situation is like very few others in the league. Case in point: They signed Price even while burdened by the likely  dead weight of the Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval contracts, which could cripple other teams (let’s see how the Royals’ nutty Sal Perez hampers them down the line). The Sox don’t need to worry about financial flexibility. As we’ll see, they make their own money, and in doing so, also make their own luck.

The Red Sox generated $28m in spending in Boston last weekend for football and hurling. David Price part of FSM’s brilliance

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) December 1, 2015

Instead of focusing on the cash, this column will be about celebrating ace-level pitching from a true Sox superstar for the first time since Pedro Martinez toed the rubber. Of the two other potential candidates for this extremely subjective honor, Curt Schilling was great but unctuous even in his playing days, and Jon Lester was too under-the-radar (and happy about it, provided he actually gets happy) to be a national star. Price was one of the faces of baseball well before Dave Dombrowski handed him a hunk of cheddar and is no less so now. Maybe in a few years he’ll peter out like Sabathia, going through the late-contract motions now, and The Big Unit, who was bitten by the AL’s deamons pretty much the first time he pitched up a ball in Yankee Stadium. But there is never any time like the present, and we have a legit ace now.

And yes, he cost a lot, but again, so what? I was happy the Sox went and snatched Hanley Ramirez and, yes, Pablo Sandoval last winter, and I’m glad they landed Price now. What is the ultimate cost to me of that decision? Maybe $10, in the ultimate trickle-down of television fees and licensed goods purchases? If so, I consider it $10 well-spent.  To that end, I’m making Price’s a contract a good business decision for me. I don’t care if he earns his money, but I’m sure gonna get my let’s-say $10 worth.

It is, to be sure, a privilege of rooting for a big-market team. It’s also important to note that the same couldn’t be said if Price was on a team that was actively pulling on the public teat for money. The Braves, for example, are hitting up Cobb County taxpayers for $400 million, and had they signed Price, he’d cost the fans way more than that $10 I’m just sort of pulling out of thin air. As MarketWatch’s Jason Notte wrote in a December column, Fenway Sports Group is the rare ownership cabal that makes money by spending money — the easiest way to think about the whole thing is that the Red Sox buy their players in cash, whereas other, crappier teams, charge the players to you. You just get billed in a way you never notice it, which is, of course, the entire point.

With the Sox, there are no accounting tricks. They are a twin model franchise alongside the St. Louis Cardinals, the Yankees having been more or less broken up into two separate entities — self-importance and northeast brusque —  by entropy, rule changes and the descent and death of George Steinbrenner, starting sometime between when Dave Roberts left first base and ended up at second way back in 2004. He didn’t just steal a base; he stole part of the Yankees’ place in baseball’s firmament. Price, the non-Yankee, is the logical endpoint of all this. He’s our executioner turned our executioner. This column will be a tribute to the violence in his cutting down the rest of the league. Price is going to bring the pain, and we are going to love it, and we are going to do it right here.

Photo by Butch Dill/USA Today Sports Images