SAN DIEGO — For the second straight outing, Merrill Kelly looked more like the Merrill Kelly the Diamondbacks have grown accustomed to seeing for nearly a decade.
Mixing up his pitches, Kelly kept the Padres’ hitters off balance during his seven innings of work, and the Diamondbacks did just enough offensively to come away with a 3-1 win Thursday night and a split of the four-game set at Petco Park.
Kelly has long been a consistent member of the rotation, but that hadn’t been the case this year.
Kelly allowed one run over seven innings — a solo homer by Manny Machado in the second — while walking three and striking out six.
The Diamondbacks had lost the previous two games and were in desperate need of a win to stay within shouting distance in the NL Wild Card race as they head to Los Angeles for a three-game weekend series with the Dodgers.
“With how my season’s been going this year, it probably means a little bit more,” Kelly said of his outing. “Just that I was finally able to deliver when they needed me. So we’re happy about that. Obviously, happy we got the series [split], and hopefully we can keep this momentum going into the weekend.”
Prior to his start against the Brewers, Kelly felt like he had been thinking too much, overanalyzing the reason for his struggles and what changes he needed to make.
So when he took the mound against Milwaukee, he said he just went into compete mode and stopped overthinking. That was the same approach he had against the Padres.
“It’s going to be the mindset from here on out,” Kelly said. “You know, I obviously wasn’t happy with what I was doing before.”
Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo wasn’t happy with what he saw from his team Wednesday night when the Padres beat them, 10-4, as Arizona made both mental and physical errors.
“It was awful,” Lovullo said after that game. “We missed opportunities to collect outs on defense. There was a couple of misplays, mishandled balls, a pickoff, a bobble in left field. That’s not D-backs baseball. I think we’re better than we’re playing. I think we’re trying to go forward with our emergency brake on. I’m just trying to figure out how to get that emergency brake off and go out and play D-backs style of baseball on both sides of the ball.”
On Thursday, they did that.
Kelly set the tone, and the defense played clean baseball, turning a pair of double plays and getting a nice play from catcher Gabriel Moreno, who back picked Padres right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. off at first base in the third.
The offense was opportunistic and did just enough to win with the Diamondbacks scoring a run on a wild pitch to tie the game at 1-1 in the fourth and getting an RBI single from Geraldo Perdomo in the fifth and a solo homer from Nolan Arenado in the sixth.
The Diamondbacks need to start stacking wins between now and the Aug. 3 Trade Deadline to avoid being sellers for the second straight year, something the players are well aware of, especially Kelly, who was dealt to the Rangers at last year’s Deadline.
“I think there’s definitely some urgency,” Kelly said. “We know what’s kind of looming around the corner after the [All-Star] break and we’re in a spot where we’ve been kind of treading water a little bit. Hopefully we can take this momentum and have a good series in L.A., and everybody kind of reset and enjoy the break and hopefully carry the good baseball that we’ve been playing this week into [the second half] and before the Deadline.”
