Over the last two years, David Price has thrown his four-seamer less often than ever before. The pitch has also gotten slower than ever, so it’s tempting to paint this as part of an old story, the one about the starting pitcher with fading stuff going to the bendier pitches to get outs. But instead, it looks like it’s part of a different story, one that’s both very old and very new.

I mean, yes, Price’s fastball is not as fast as it used to be.

And that has caused Price to go away from his fastball and change — his favorite pitch combo earlier in his career — to his sinker and cutter more often in recent years. Look at his career in thirds starting with his first big year, and it’s remarkable how each fastball has gone in and out of favor over time.

Four-seamer & Change Cutter & Sinker 2010-2013 37% 54% 2014-2016 43% 48% 2017-2018 26% 69%

It’s also true that fastball percentage and age are correlated among starters. Not strongly, but age does predict some of the variance in fastball usage, and you can say with a little bit of confidence that pitchers use the fastball less as they age.

But placing Price within the long history of older pitchers throwing junk as they stave off Father Time may not be telling the whole story. Yes, Price has adapted, but it may not only be about velocity and avoiding the straighter four-seamer.

Here’s a hint that we’re not just seeing a pitcher turf an ineffective pitch: These are the whiff rates on his four-seamer and changeups over his career. You could say they’re going up! They’re at least stable.

He’s using the four-seam and changeup less these days… and they’re doing better than ever, thank you very much. While that can be true for a pitch as it transitions from a workhorse to a show horse — now the four-seamer can be used for surprise attacks instead of for establishing strike one — it doesn’t tell us why the pitcher started ditching the four-seamer for the sinker.

There’s a recently refined concept that does help us understand, though. Tunneling has been around forever — there’s Perry Husband’s concept of Effective Velocity, and the age-old truism of “late movement” making it difficult for the batter to make his decisions — but recently, Baseball Prospectus debuted an array of statistics that help us understand the concepts better.

One of the concepts, PreMax, is the distance between two pitches at the moment that the batter has to decide to swing or not. The other, PlatePre Ratio, is the distance between two pitches at the plate divided by the distance between the two pitches at the decision point. Based on neuroscience research and pitch tracking data, we can rank pitchers based on who throws their pitches in the tightest tunnel, and whose pitches move the most after that tunnel.

In both cases, Price’s arsenal works better if he works primarily with the sinker.

Here are his primary pitch pairings as they rank on Baseball Prospectus’ leaderboards. I’ve put them here as percentiles so that I could combine pairings where he threw the sinker first and then the cutter with the pairings where he threw the cutter and then the sinker. Since a higher percentile is better, you can see that the sinker works as a better pitch for tunneling with his stuff. This is from his 2016 season, to get his last healthy stats as a starter for reference.

PlatePre Ratio PreMax Distance Fourseam + Change 48 49 Fourseam + Cutter 38 44 Sinker + Change 71 72 Sinker + Cutter 65 62

The sinker appears closer to his secondary pitches at the decision point, and then ends up further away from his secondary pitches at the plate.

Here’s how it looks in practice.

In his start against the Rays this year, David Price threw C.J. Cron a cutter inside, and then a sinker that was inside but over the plate. Cron took both pitches. Here’s what they look like back to back, thanks to the amazing work of Joe Schwarz and @cardinalsgifs.

You see it yet? The two pitches look the same for a long time. But while the cutter dove inside, the sinker tailed back to the zone for a called strike. Trade a ball for a strike three times and the pitcher wins. Here’s what the two pitches looked like from Cron’s perspective, with the decision points highlighted in white.

At the flashing point, there’s little to no difference between the two pitches. Then there’s maybe what looks like almost a foot of difference at the plate. Let’s try to overlay the two pitches so that this decision point gets highlighted.

Perfect alignment, and then, boom, separation. So we know what a well-tunneled cutter and sinker might look like. And where they might show up. This is why Price threw more inside cutters and sinkers to righties than any other lefty in baseball last year.

But what does a poorly tunneled cutter and four-seamer look like? In a word, meat.

That second pitch didn’t really have a chance. It already looked so different at the decision point that Judge knew it wasn’t a cutter that might end up below the zone.

Maybe Price just missed his location, but you can also see that the pitches don’t tunnel well. They don’t look similar out of the hand and they don’t look that different at the plate — it’s a toxic combo, and part of why Price’s four-seam and cutter tunnel combo ranks as below average around the league.

Let’s focus on the good again. If you’re not convinced that Cron gave up on the ball because he thought it was a sinker in the example above, take a look at the body language on teammate Adeiny Hecchevaria when he saw virtually the same sequence in a slightly different location.

A hundred bucks says Hechevarria thought a cutter was headed straight for his toes on the second pitch. Looks like a simple called strike in the books.

We’re taught, though, that changeups should have a lot of difference in movement and velocity from the fastball. And since sinkers and two-seamers have more movement than four-seamers, wouldn’t a changeup pair poorly with a sinker?

Not in Price’s case, at least. The sinker and changeup look very similar at the beginning, and then as we see from his nearly top-quartile difference at the plate — they aren’t the same at the end. Here it is in practice: a sinker and a changeup to Rougned Odor.

The overlay tells the story, but look how similar they are at the decision point for the hitter. The velocity difference puts them apart, but not by much, and the movement is almost a perfect match until that changeup disappears at the end.

Put it together in stereoscopic view.

Odor was on the sinker, just barely fouling it off. He wasn’t anywhere near the changeup. Hitting looks tough.

Let’s look at the newest pairing that Price has figured out, the cutter and the changeup. Here he throws the two pitches to Trey Mancini. First the cutter low and in, and then a changeup that looks like it’s headed in the same direction, only to drop below Mancini’s bat over the middle of the plate.

To Mancini, this may have looked like a great opportunity to hit a low cutter over the middle of the plate.

Instead, it was just another strikeout for the lefty with the second-most strikeouts among qualified lefties since 2010.

Of course, this David Price is pretty different from the one we saw back in 2010, or even in 2014 for that matter. This David Price looks like he’s figured out how to tunnel his pitches well, making it even harder for batters to figure him out.

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(Top photo of Price: David Butler II-USA TODAY Sports)