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Hayhurst: David Price's History With Critics May Be Problematic In Boston

BOSTON (CBS) -- On Wednesday afternoon, former pitcher and current baseball analyst and author Dirk Hayhurst wrote a tweet with a simple message: David Price may not work well in Boston.

With Hayhurst being one of Fred Toucher's favorite guests, it followed that Hayhurst would join Toucher & Rich on Thursday morning to discuss this idea further.

Hayhurst, who spends a lot of time analyzing the Toronto Blue Jays and therefore saw Price up close this past season, made sure to note that Price is "one of the greatest guys in baseball, just a tremendous guy. Fun-loving guy, easygoing guy, bright personality. It's hard to keep him down even when he loses ... which of course means the Red Sox fan base will probably destroy him if he fails."

Hayhurst recalled a memory when he was with the Tampa Bay Rays in spring training, and Hayhurst thought very highly of Price. But upon making the transition from player to television broadcaster, Hayhurst on TBS said that Price pitched a bad playoff game in Boston ... after Price had pitched an objectively bad game in Boston.

"That was it! That was all I said! After that, David was not happy that a former firend and teammate had spoken ill of him -- well, what I call objective, he calls ill," Hayhurst said. "[Price] took to the Internet, said Tom Verducci couldn't even be the water boy and said I could not hack it in the big leagues, we were both #Nerds."

This story certainly plays into the perception that Price has some thin skin. (His Twitter replies are also a pretty good indication of that.)

"I was worried about that. I really am," Hayhurst said. "We know the Boston fan base is a very unique fan base. It's a very blue-collar, hardworking fan base and they do not like it when freshly minted millionaires have big, carefree personalities and blast that out on the Internet. It pulls in a lot of anger, and that's fine and perfectly normal, because that's all the politics of being an athlete. It's when you respond to that in a personal manner when you start to get in trouble.

"And all you can go off of when you sign a pitcher is their past record, and all we can go off of when we project how they're going to respond to what happens on the Internet is what they've done in the past. And if the past is any indication, then there is a higher probability for David Price that he will react and turn it into a major issue, or throw fuel on the fire by responding to these criticizers, especially the media. When the media tries to get into his mind or put words in his mouth or he feels like that's happening, he'll sometimes choose Twitter as his chosen platform to respond to it. And of course it just the worst -- it is the worst -- context and platform ever to do anything like this. And Boston being Boston, I can see how that could go awry."

Given the Red Sox' massive monetary investment in Price, Hayhurst figures there will be some "media training" for the $217 million man to avoid any Twitter issues.

After Price signed, reports came out that said the Cardinals were offering as much as $190 million, and Price expected and was even "enamored" with the idea of playing in St. Louis. Yet it was the extra $27 million that convinced Price to go to Boston. Is that a problem?

"100 percent. 100 percent, I believe it's an issue," Hayhurst said. "If you don't feel like it was going to be a good fit in your mind, and you really wanted to go someplace else, and then $30 million was the difference-maker for you, when you were already going to make enough money to buy Haiti, it doesn't really matter at this point what $30 million is going to do for you. You've got enough million dollars. Really, honestly, you do. I don't think it's going to suddenly buy these values away from you that you already put a distinct value on how you thought your life was going to go someplace else.

"I can see this backfiring, and I'm going to point directly at that reason why. If you had a team in mind that you thought represented you, and you had worked to a point in your career where you could go any place you wanted to go and the money was going to be magnificent no matter what, but you chose to go somewhere else just because someone changed zero? I don't like that. I really don't. I think that business and history shows us that's a bad move, and that could be the foreshadowing of bad things to come. But I don't think the performance is going to suffer; I just think some of the relationships might. We'll see how that works out."

Listen to the full discussion below:

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