ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – A knock on the door came midway through John Gibbons’ daily pre-game session with beat writers Friday afternoon, with the manager immediately inviting the visitor into his office.

David Price opened the door, leaned on it as Josh Thole peaked in behind him, and made a pronouncement.

“I need Thole behind the dish,” demanded Price. “He got me locked in today.”

“I didn’t even lobby for him to do this,” said Thole.

“They said it was a perfect game you threw,” replied Gibbons.

“I need Thole, alright?” implored Price. “I need John Thole. Thanks.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” countered Gibbons. “I’m not quite sure if he’ll be active for the playoff roster.”

Price though, wasn’t having it: “There are loopholes.”

With that the ace left-hander exited, feeling good about his two innings in a simulated game earlier in the afternoon, and about the plan for him to start Game 1 of the American League Division Series on 11 days of rest, the first pitcher to do that in a team’s playoff opener since Red Ruffing in 1939.

“I didn’t go through the motions, I got after it and I felt good,” Price said of the sim game. “That’s not why this is going on. If you can take some days off at the end of the season, it’s huge. Back in the day there were a lot of guys who would go on the phantom DL for two weeks. That’s not what this is. I’ll throw a bullpen in two or three days and then I’ll be ready for my start on Thursday.”

Price’s competition in the same game included fellow all-star Troy Tulowitzki, whom he caught looking and got on a fly out to centre.

“Bad call on the 0-2, but we had fun with it,” said Tulowitzki, who returned to the lineup Friday night for the first time since Sept. 12. “David is a good friend of mine, obviously. He’s a great competitor. Even when we’re out there playing a sim game, to be honest, you want to perform well. That’s what we’re going to be talking about in the clubhouse the whole time so we’ll have fun with it.”

Price took all kinds of ribbing in the clubhouse while speaking with reporters, getting chirped for the long gap between starts, with Mark Lowe reminding him that the season is 162 games.

“These guys are telling me I’m sitting on my numbers. Yeah that’s me – sitting on my numbers. I don’t want to pitch ‘cause I don’t want to make an error,” he deadpanned.

Price finishes the season 18-5 with a 2.45 ERA over 220.1 innings for the Blue Jays and Detroit Tigers – making him a top contender for the Cy Young Award.

“In my mind, I thought we’d really like to see him win the Cy Young, but he said, ‘I don’t care about that anyway,’” said manager John Gibbons. “That’s really what it came down to. He’s more concerned about this, which showed me something, too. He totally understood it, otherwise he would have thrown that one inning (Thursday) in that slop if we hadn’t clinched the day before and he would have been banged anyway.”

Price threw a career-high 248.1 innings last year yet despite that says he feels as good as he ever has at the end of a season.

“I’m completely fine with (the extra rest),” he says. “The mound is still going to be 60 feet six inches. That’s my greatest fear in the off-season, that I’ll forget how to throw. In 11 days, that’s not going to happen. I threw a live BP to Tulo today, and to (Matt) Hague and (Jonathan) Diaz. It went really well. I’ll be ready.”

As for the 0-2 pitch Tulowitzki disputed, Price said: “That ball was more middle than it was in.”

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TULO TIME: Troy Tulowitzki’s return to the lineup Friday came just under three weeks after suffering a crack in his left scapula, or shoulder blade. The initial plan was to have him rest, or perhaps DH, on Saturday before playing again Sunday in a final tune-up for the playoffs.

“We’ll get him out there and try and get some timing going for him,” said John Gibbons. “I think it’s big. If he couldn’t do it this weekend and he was ready to do it next weekend, he was still going to play. But that’ll definitely help him. It’s got to.”

Tulowitzki went 3-for-6 in the sim game Friday afternoon, hitting a home run off 2015 Blue Jays draft pick Daniel Young. He isn’t 100 per cent healed, but he’s ready to go.

“Just like any time with an injury, probably that area is a little bit sore,” said Tulowitzki. “Obviously the muscles have been stretched out and overworked a little bit from all the work I put in with it, but overall it’s good enough to play, obviously. To be able to swing felt good, so that tells me I’m ready.

“I think that’s the reason that I’m going to play in some games here is to hopefully get those out of the way before the playoffs start but there are some things you can’t practice, that the game just brings, so we’ll see what happens.”

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POST-SEASON PLANNING: The Blue Jays coaching staff and key front office members planned to meet Saturday to begin deliberating over the post-season roster due the morning of Oct. 8.

While most details are yet to be worked out, John Gibbons did say that he thinks “11 (pitchers) would be plenty. You need four starters. So that would be 14 position players. I think that’s the way we’re approaching it. It’s pretty obvious. There’s not a whole lot of questions to answer.”

One of them is if they’ll carry a second left-hander in the bullpen behind Brett Cecil, and if so, who will it be. They only have two options – Aaron Loup and Jeff Francis and Gibbons made it clear he’s looking for one of them to step up.

“I’d like to see Loupy try to get some lefties out a little bit more,” he said. “That would help.”