The pain in Merrill Kelly’s right shoulder had been bothersome for the past 10 days or so, but the more he threw, the looser he got, and the more the discomfort seemed to subside. It wasn’t until the past few days, he said, that the pain became less and less manageable, and as he began to warm up on Monday night, he realized the time had come.
“I could just tell it was time,” he said, “to get this thing taken care of.”
Kelly was scratched from his scheduled start against the Colorado Rockies and placed on the 10-day injured list with a nerve impingement in his right shoulder, a potentially sizeable blow to a Diamondbacks pitching staff that had been leaning heavily on him during the season’s opening month.