Kelly pitches Arizona to victory
When the year began, right-hander Merrill Kelly was a significant question mark in a rotation filled with them. At the season’s midway point, he has been the only starter the Diamondbacks have been able to count on every fifth day.
Kelly turned in another workmanlike performance on Thursday night, giving the Diamondbacks seven solid innings in a 5-3 win over the San Francisco Giants at Chase Field.
It was the third consecutive outing in which Kelly stopped a skid: On June 21, he beat the Milwaukee Brewers to end a 17-game losing streak.
Five days later, he beat the Padres in San Diego to end a record 24-game road losing streak.
This skid, a four-game drought, was modest by comparison, but it served to further underscore Kelly’s importance to a club desperate for quality starts. Those three Kelly victories are the only ones the Diamondbacks have logged over their past 27 games.
“We’re looking for stoppers in that rotation and he certainly is one of them,” manager Torey Lovullo said. “That’s a credit to him. He’s been working his butt off. It’s not by accident that he’s having that type of a year.”
Kelly’s year has been hard to define. In one sense, it is an unqualified success. Last August, he began experiencing swelling and discoloration in his right arm. He discovered he had a blood clot, then found out he would need season-ending surgery to address thoracic outlet syndrome.
He entered this year with questions about whether he would be fully healthy and if he could regain his old form.
That he has been the Diamondbacks’ only healthy starter through 83 games provides a clear answer to the former; as for the latter, the numbers might not accurately tell the story of his season.
Through 17 starts, Kelly has 4.67 ERA. He has logged quality starts in just seven of his outings. And yet, to those who have watched Kelly this year, the results do not seem to reflect his performance.
“I don’t think the numbers,” Lovullo said, “show anybody how good he has thrown the baseball.”