{"id":348434,"date":"2025-12-14T15:35:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T15:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/348434\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T15:35:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T15:35:07","slug":"diamondbacks-to-sign-merrill-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/348434\/","title":{"rendered":"Diamondbacks To Sign Merrill Kelly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Diamondbacks are finalizing a contract with right-hander <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/players\/k\/kellyme01.shtml?utm_medium=linker&amp;utm_source=www.mlbtraderumors.com&amp;utm_campaign=2025-12-14_br\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Merrill Kelly<\/a>, according to a report from <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Ken_Rosenthal\/status\/2000215174611955771?s=20\" rel=\"nofollow\">Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic<\/a>. Rosenthal adds that it\u2019s a two-year, $40MM pact. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/JonHeyman\/status\/2000216104329753062?s=20\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jon Heyman of The New York Post<\/a> adds that the deal is pending a physical.<\/p>\n<p>Kelly, 37, returns to the team with which he has spent nearly his entire major league career. Though initially drafted by the Rays in the eighth-round of the 2010 draft, Kelly made his big league debut with the Diamondbacks back in 2019 after a four-season stay in Korea as a member of the KBO\u2019s SK Wyverns (now known as the SSG Landers). After a pedestrian rookie campaign in the majors where he pitched to a league-average ERA in 32 starts, Kelly managed to fashion a role for himself as one of the better mid-rotation arms in the majors.<\/p>\n<p>Since the start of the 2022 campaign, Kelly has pitched to a 3.47 ERA (120 ERA+) in 108 starts. He\u2019s struck out 23.1% of his opponents while walking 7.7% in that time, leaving him with a 3.81 FIP. While Kelly\u2019s peripherals (including a 4.03 SIERA) cast him as a step down from your prototypical front-end starter, the veteran has managed to remain a quality rotation piece eating innings at a high level (with at least 175 innings of work in three of the last four seasons) and endeared himself to fans in Arizona when he delivered a brilliant 2.25 ERA during the club\u2019s run to the World Series in 2023.<\/p>\n<p>More to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Diamondbacks are finalizing a contract with right-hander Merrill Kelly, according to a report from Ken Rosenthal of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[38794,363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-348434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-merrill-kelly","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}