Nerves, jitters, and butterflies, these are a few of the things players making their major league debuts have to deal with. What’s the best way to get rid of those feelings of insecurity? By striking out the side to start your major league career of course.

Wade Davis did just that yesterday against the Detroit Tigers. A (somewhat) local product, Davis’ jitters were likely intensified pitching in front of family and friends – insert your joke here about how those folks made up the majority of the Rays crowd – and fell behind to the first batter with a pitch outside and low. He’d come back and retire Curtis Granderson on a swinging strikeout and then catch paint to retire Ramon Santiago. Carlos Guillen would suffer a similar fate and just like that Davis’ career innings total registered in at one.

He came out for the second and struck out Miguel Cabrera swinging. Aubrey Huff would homer and the realization that Davis wouldn’t pitch a perfect game set in. He then struck out the next two batters. At the end of the day Davis wound up with seven completed innings, nine strikeouts, a single walk, and one earned run.

Davis threw 100 pitches, 12% of which were whiffed at, 10 of those hacks were at fastballs. Davis threw 71 of them and saw the pitch average 92 MPH and touch 94.4. He threw a handful of change-ups that sat about 10 ticks lower, two handfuls of sliders that sat around 85-86, and nearly three handfuls of curves that sat in the high-70s. Davis failed to induce a swing and miss on the pitch, but it showed good vertical drop as portrayed in this gif (courtesy of Baseball-Intellect.com)

For a team that dealt what many considered their ace just a week ago, having Davis come up with a solid showing will (if nothing else) show they possess some idea of what they’re doing. For Davis himself, this undoubtedly will cause some helium in his public perception despite only being one start. Nobody should expect this every time out, but it’s a feel-good story of a local kid pitching in his first game the day before his 24th birthday against a playoff team. Coincidentally, Edwin Jackson was on the mound for the Tigers. He knows better than anyone what a good debut can do for your stock.

There might not be an easier player in baseball to project than Pedro Feliz. Always known for his glove more than his bat, Feliz has settled into a remarkably consistent pattern of offensive results.

2006: .709 OPS
2007: .708 OPS
2008: .705 OPS
2009: .706 OPS

That’s hard to do. Feliz’s skills have shifted around from year to year more than those numbers would suggest – he makes better contact than he used to, but his power has disappeared since May – but the overall effect has been about the same. As one pat of his game improves, something else declies in proportion, leaving him the same guy he was the year before. Literally.

One of the other interesting things about Feliz is his consistently low BABIP. This year, he’s running a .293 mark, around average for a normal player but 20 points above his career mark. His BABIPs the last four years – .273, .267, .259, and .258. In pretty much any given year, you could sort the leaderboard and find Feliz at the bottom.

Despie being a good defender, he’s not fast and he doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard. This combination conspires to rob him of hits on pitches most players would be able to capitalize on, which is one of the reasons that his offense usually ends up something less than the sum of his parts. A guy with his contact skills and gap power should be a better hitter, but Feliz has a pretty well established offensive track record by now.

His glove at third base is terrific and certainly justifies keeping him in the line-up on a regular basis. Just don’t expect different results when he’s batting – Feliz defines consistency at the plate.

Last night, Pedro Martinez reminded everyone why he’s going to Cooperstown when he retires. Unable to find a job until the second half of the season, Martinez was something of an experiment for the Phillies. Consider it a successful gamble.

His fastball hit 92 last night, and he’s averaging 88-89 with it again, not that far off from where it was in his heyday. His change-up is still as nasty as ever, and he had it working last night, getting swinging strikes with four of the 20 that he threw. Even after adjusting for the fact that the Giants offense is pretty miserable, Pedro was still terrific last night – 7 innings, 5 hits, 0 walks, 9 strikeouts, 87 pitches.

For the season, Pedro has now thrown 23 innings and ran a 4/23 BB/K rate. He’s still prone to the longball, but even giving up frequent home runs, his FIP stands at 3.74. Given his command of the strike zone and ability to keep hitters off balance, Martinez is still capable of shutting teams down on any given night. Durability is going to be a constant question with him, but his ability to get big league hitters out should not be.

The rejuvenation of a former ace coming off arm problems serves as yet another reminder that we don’t really have any credible way of judging when a player is washed up. Seemingly every time someone publishes a eulogy on an active player, he finds the fountain of youth and makes them eat their words.

Maybe Pedro wasn’t so crazy to ask for $5 million last winter. He’s still got the stuff to be worth twice that.

Last night for Triple-A Durham, Desmond Jennings tied an International League record by going 7-for-7 in a single game. That’s pretty good. Desmond Jennings is pretty good.

This season Jennings has already put the Southern League MVP under his belt. There, in Double-A, he posted a .316/.395/.486 line with 37 bases in 42 tries. As some extra icing on the cake, coaches and managers rated him the best defensive outfielder in the league. He also displayed tremendous plate discipline, drawing 48 walks against 52 strikeouts in 440 plate appearances. Jennings was doing a little bit of everything. He has not slowed down a bit since being called up to Triple-A.

For Durham Jennings has a downright tasty .420 wOBA over 116 plate appearances, including 14 more steals in 16 tries. He’s also walking more (18 BB) than he’s striking out (14 K).

Because of his tools, performance and football background, Jennings has been drawn a few comparisons to his future teammate, Carl Crawford. While Crawford was up in the majors by the time he was 20, Jennings, 22, has shown more patience and extra base pop throughout his minor league career. The only major question mark is his durability.

With B.J. Upton, Crawford and Jennings in the outfield in 2010, the Rays will boast just a freakishly athletic and rangy outfield.

There’s an old saying about patience being a virtue. Over the years we’ve established that possessing plate patience is a virtue too, one that some players, like Miguel Olivo undoubtedly lacks. In 345 plate appearances Miguel Olivo has walked ten times. Four pitches have made contact with his wide body and he successfully bunted once. Those 15 occurrences account for the difference between Olivo’s plate appearance and at-bats figures. Olivo has struck out 110 times.

That’s 10 walks, 110 strikeouts. Ouch.

Since 1901, there have been 10 seasons where a batter struck out more than 100 times and walked less than 15 in at least 300 plate appearances. Olivo lays claim to three of those seasons. That’s right, it’s happened ten times, and he’s responsible for three of those. His first time was in 2006 as a Florida Marlin when he walked nine times with 103 strike outs in 452 plate appearances. He followed that up with 123 strikeouts and 14 walks in 469 plate appearances the very next year.

His strikeout rate of 33.3% is a career high, despite that his BB/K ratio is equal to his 2006 ratio and his 2008 ratio. You would expect his plate discipline and patience to improve over the years, right? Yeah, right:

Amusingly the emotion this invokes in most Royals fans is held within the graph, see:

Reports have the Royals pondering a separation from Olivo. That would be smart. With that, I fully expect a four-year extension to be announced any day now.

Other players to pull an Olivo include Orlando Miller in 1996; Juan Encarnacion in 1999; Alex Gonzalez in 1999; Craig Paquette in 1993; Tommie Agee in 168; John Bateman in 1963; and Rolando Roomes in 1989.

The 1975 Reds’ pitching staff gets ions less in way of coverage. It’s for good reason though, they were a middle of the pack staff at best.

Don Gullett, Gary Nolan, Pat Darcy, Fred Norman, and Jack Billingham each threw over 100 innings. None of them were overly impressive by FIP standards, although Gullet boasted an excellent ERA and Nolan walked nobody.

Saying the entire staff was middle at best is not entirely fair. The bullpen was pretty fantastic, the rotation was not. Clay Carroll, Randy Eastwick, Will McEnaney, and Pedro Borbon were the relievers with at least 40 innings pitched. Here is their strikeout per nine ratios:

Carroll 3.81
Eastwick 6.1
McEnaney 4.75
Borbon 2.09

Borbon’s was actually the second lowest rate amongst qualifiers, just behind Ken Sanders of the Mets (1.67/9). Some overpowering relievers existed but not like they do in present times. To gain some perspective: the fifth highest ratio then was in the low-8s. Today the fifth highest ratio is nearing 12.

The Reds pen just didn’t strike anyone out. As you can see below on the graph, it illustrates that they actually struck the least percentage of total batters faced out. The good news is they refused to issue free passes either:

No other team is below 6.5%, and the Reds are at 5.1%. That’s a pretty impressive commitment to making the batter put the ball into play in order to reach base.

Combine an offense that loves walks with a pitching staff that hates them, and you get a pretty nifty team.

As the Tigers continue to move towards their probable playoff birth they have to start thinking about their playoff rotation. Justin Verlander and Edwin Jackson form a strong top two. After that Jarrod Washburn has, not unexpectedly, seen his performance come back to earth and will have his next start skipped in hopes of alleviating some knee pain. Still you have to pencil him in to the rotation. In a four-man playoff rotation they have little choice but to go with Rick Porcello as the fourth pitcher. The alternatives, Nate Robertson and Armando Galarraga, just inspire too little confidence.

Porcello is having a circa-2007 Chien-Ming Wang type season. Very poor K/9, mediocre K/BB but lots of grounders. The end result is an ok performance, no doubt aided by Detroit’s excellent infield defense. The problem is that Porcello is just 20 and has already thrown ten more innings than last year, if he takes 4 or 5 more turns through the rotation in the regular season he would be up to at least 30 innings more than last year. The Verducci effect suggests that pitching 30 or more innings more than the year before drastically increases the chance of injury to a young pitcher. The Tigers would, of course, ease those guidelines for playoff innings, but it would be nice if they could limit Porcello’s regular season innings, as the Yankees are doing with Joba Chamberlain.

Unfortunately the Tigers’s rotation is not healthy, or deep, enough to do that in the thick of a still not totally settled AL Central race. Nate Robertson came off a AAA rehab stint to enter the rotation in place of Armando Galarraga who was out with elbow inflammation. Now Galarraga has to come straight back to the majors rather than make a scheduled start in AAA to take Washburn’s spot. So there is not much opportunity to skip Porcello’s starts at the moment.

Hopefully the Tigers can wrap up the division soon or get Robertson, Galarraga and Washburn simultaneously healthy, so they can limit Porcello’s innings down the stretch. If not they could, if they go on a deep playoff run, put a dangerous number of innings on Procello’s young arm.

We talked a bit about Jason Bartlett yesterday, but in that, we glossed over the context of just how ridiculous the Rays infield depth is right now. Here’s a snapshot of their IF depth chart, as it stands currently.

1B: Carlos Pena, Willy Aybar
2B: Ben Zobrist, Akinori Iwamura
SS: Jason Bartlett, Reid Brignac
3B: Evan Longoria, Sean Rodriguez

Rodriguez could cover any of in the infield positions, and actually has experience at all three outfield spots as well, so he’s particularly well suited to a super utility role. That kind of jack-of-all-trades guy makes the two-deep-at-each-spot thing unnecessary.

Realistically, the Rays only need six of these guys. There just aren’t at-bats to go around for all of them, and while depth is nice, superfluous players could be better used to acquire others who fit the needs of the roster a bit more. So, of those eight, who should stay and who should go?

The obvious first candidate is Iwamura, who is only under contract for 2010 if the Rays want him to be, with a $4.5 million option for 2010. He’s been worth double that over the last couple of years, but as a 30-year-old coming off ACL surgery, he’s got some risks attached going forward. He’s not going to beat out Zobrist for a job, so his future would seem to lie in another city. The Rays could pick up his option and try to trade him, but I doubt he has enough surplus value above his $4.5 million salary that he’d command much in return. Either way, I’d expect to see Iwamura playing somewhere besides Tampa next year.

That’s one down, but still unnecessary depth up the middle. Aybar serves as a useful back-up to Longoria/Pena and wouldn’t carry enough trade value to command a lot in return, so he probably sticks around. Assuming the team won’t be moving Longoria, Zobrist, or Pena, they leaves the shortstops – Bartlett and Brignac.

We talked about Bartlett yesterday, so let’s focus on Brignac today.

At first glance, his numbers may not seem that exciting – .282/.327/.417 in Triple-A sounds rather weak. However, his .328 wOBA was actually above the International League average, and you don’t find many 23 year old shortstops who can hold their own with the bat. His overly aggressive approach and weakness against lefties limited his overall line, however, and proved to be problems in the big leagues as well.

There’s little chance that Brignac would match Bartlett’s 2009 production, but that statement is true of nearly every shortstop on earth. The question the Rays will have to ask is how much of a difference they expect between the two, and whether that performance difference is worth the cost difference. Given that they are running out of spots on the roster to upgrade, they might not be willing to take the drop-off at SS as they try to run down the Yankees and Red Sox, even if Brignac is the more cost effective solution.

Either way, it’s likely that one of them joins Iwamura in leaving Tampa this winter. They have two quality shortstops in a league lacking for guys who can play the position, and will have a strong bargaining chip to play with whichever way they decide to go.

September is usually a lot of fun, with pennant races heating up and teams fighting for every last win in an effort to grab a playoff spot. This year, though, it looks like we’re in for a fairly boring month.

According to Coolstandings, the Yankees are 95.8% favorites to win the AL East. Even if the Red Sox manage to run them down, New York is still likely to win the wild card. There is basically no chance that the Yankees miss the playoffs. They’re just playing out the string at this point.

Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Los Angeles are in the same position, essentially. All three NL division leaders have 95% or better odds of winning their divisions. Colorado tried to make the west interesting, but without a miracle, it was too little, too late. Even the two division races where one team isn’t a near lock still have the potential to be decided in the first part of the month. The Angels recent skid has put them at only 76.5% likely to win the AL West, but a strong week could end that race pretty quickly.

Likewise, the Tigers are 74% likely to win the AL Central, but with a 4.5 game lead on the Twins, this one could be over soon if Minnesota falters.

The only real race in baseball is the NL wild card chase, as Colorado and San Francisco are just a single game apart. That should be fun to watch, but one playoff chase left on September 3rd? That’s not cool.

This has been a fun season, but it looks like its going to end with a whimper unless one of these seemingly impenetrable forces falls apart in the next few weeks.

Tim Hudson made his long awaited return from Tommy John surgery late Monday night. While he showed some rust, he performed OK over all — allowing two earned runs over 5.1 innings with 6 hits allowed and three walks, while striking out five.

Here’s his movement graph. Pitch F/x apparently forgot the scouting report on Huddy, so rather than then taking the time to manually reclassify his pitches, I just broke them down by velocity.

Still a very nice sinker, splitter, cutter and curve for Hudson. He averaged about 89 MPH with his fastball and hit up to 92, so the early returns are encouraging. Thank goodness for Dr. Jobe’s miraculous invention. But now what do the Braves do with their rotation? With Hudson’s return, the Braves now have six good starting pitchers in their rotation, an embarrassment of riches. Something has to give.

Javier Vazquez 181.1 IP – 3.18 ERA – 2.83 FIP – 48.4 RAR – 5.4 WAR
Jair Jurrjens 171 IP – 2.89 ERA – 3.75 FIP – 29.3 RAR – 3.1 WAR
Derek Lowe 164.1 IP – 4.38 ERA – 3.73 FIP – 28.6 RAR – 3 WAR
Thomas Hanson 89.2 IP – 3.15 ERA – 3.98 FIP – 13.1 RAR – 1.4 WAR
Kenshin Kawakami 142.2 IP – 3.97 ERA – 4.30 FIP – 16.3 RAR – 1.7 WAR

The odd man out is reportedly Kenshin Kawakami, who was signed as a free agent from Japan over the winter and has proven to be about what the Braves had hoped: a little better than league average. Teams would be blessed to have him as their 4th starter, he’s now the Braves’ 6th starter, making him the best swing-man in the biz.

So what do the Braves do with this wonderful problem that they have in the offseason? I know the saying goes that you never have too much pitching, but Hudson has a $12M option for next season. While that’s somewhat tempting given the fact that Huddy may now be as good as new, if the Braves decide to pick it up, that would mean they would be allocating $45M to four pitchers in their rotation. Lowe is guaranteed $15M next year. Vasquez, $11.5M. Kawakami, around $7M. With the presence of two terrific cost-controlled options of Thomas Hanson and Jair Jurrjens and the Braves in desperate need of some offense, Hudson is probably headed for free agency this year. Millions of dollars are on the line for Hudson, with just a few starts remaining.