Joe Kelly was pitching through cysts on a nerve in his shoulder. Possibly for a long time.
In an interview on WEEI in Boston yesterday, our hero revealed that his shoulder’s been bothering him since the end of the 2019 season, and that during his suspension after the Carlos Correa incident, he was having trouble sleeping because “it felt like fire ants were eating my arm from the inside out.” He returned and pitched through it (still wild he wasn’t named the World Series MVP), willing the Dodgers to a championship, but he needed surgery, and in November, he had that surgery. Cysts, decompressed. Loose bodies, removed.
In other words, his absence hasn’t been as that mysterious or surprising as previous circumstance suggested. How the cyst got there, though? Well. I’d like to hear Rob Manfred explain that one.
