It was a three up, three down performance by Matt Belisle last Thursday against Miami, but afterwards the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher began to experience discomfort near his right elbow.
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“Getting on the plane, things progressively got a little worse and stiffened up and got sore,” explained Belisle. “Obviously, we knew there was an issue. I woke up the next morning with a lot of limited range of motion and knew something wasn’t right and that I just couldn’t pitch.”
As a result, Belisle has been placed on the disabled list–retroactive to June 26th and purchased the contract of Marcus Hatley from Memphis to add to the 25-man roster.
“We’ve done what we could with a little bit of rest and then tried to play a little bit of catch and it aggravated it a little bit more,” said Belisle. “We just knew the best thing for the team’s sake is to get another arm in here and give this time to do what it needs to.”
“As you can tell, it just drives him nuts because he just wants to compete,” said Mike Matheny. “He’s always ready to go, there’s days we just have to shut him down and he doesn’t have any say in it, so that just kind of tells you how bad it hurts him. I brought it up a few days ago–because we didn’t have him for that whole Chicago series, but I brought it up that we might have to DL him early on and he flipped out and said we need to wait, let’s try a few other things so this is tough for him. But it could be a good break–get things right. The medical team doesn’t seem overly concerned it’s not something we can’t get ahead of and have him the rest of the way.”
While diagnostic ultrasound and images revealed no structural damage, it remains unclear as to what has caused the condition and Belisle said he will be examined again once the swelling on the top of his forearm goes down.
“It’s a big a curveball to me as it is to everybody else–to have a good outing and then wake up the next day and have that.”
Belisle is second on the team with 12 holds and has appeared in 30 games this season for the Cardinals, throwing 30 innings and allowing 33 hits, 10 earned runs, with 13 walks and 24 strikeouts.
photo credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports
