David Price Officially Called Up; Akinori Iwamura Done For Season, Brian Shouse to DL.

In a not so surprising move, Akinori Iwamura was placed on DL with a torn ACL; his season is over. As you know by now, Iwamura was injured on a slide by Chris Coghlan, who was "attempting" to break up a double play. The Rays have not set a date for Iwamura's surgery, but expect it to happen in the next two or three weeks. Ben Zobrist, Willy Aybar and Reid Brignac will rotate at the keystone position in his place.

What is surprising is Brian Shouse was placed on the 15-day DL as well with a left elbow strain. Shouse is 1-1 with a 3.77 ERA/4.54 FIP. He has been effective in his LOOGY role. Shouse appeared in yesterday's game, giving up the walk off single to Ross Gload. Filling Shouse's spot will be fellow side arm left hander Randy Choate. Choate has 196 games of Major League experience going 5-7 with a 4.64 ERA/3.87 FIP. Like Shouse, if used in the proper situations, he can be very effective. In order to make room for Choate on the 40-man roster, the Rays moved injured outfielder Fernando Perez from the 15-day to the 60-day roster.

On a day where the Rays revealed one badly kept secret (Joe Maddon extension), they also officially called up David Price from Triple-A Durham to make tonight's start. Price will take the spot of injured starter Scott Kazmir and is likely to stay with the Rays for good. Joe Maddon said that even though Price was on a strict pitch limit in Durham, the Rays will not hold him back.

"It's kind of difficult as a starter -- it's kind of like taking a race horse out there and always holding back a bit," Maddon said about the previous restrictions. "So now we're going to kind of let him go. He's still going to be under the restraints that I apply to everybody else, but his last time, he was really good. The strikeouts came up, everything came up the last time up. And we felt that was good enough.

"He's ready."---Joe Maddon via Raysbaseball.com

We are also ready.