Washington Nationals place Joe Ross on 10-Day IL with right elbow inflammation

Washington’s Nationals placed starter Joe Ross on the 10-Day Injured List with right elbow inflammation last night, retroactive to July 7th, after the right-hander felt something in his right forearm following his last outing, a 6 ²⁄₃-inning start in which he struck out 11 batters and gave up seven hits and three runs.

Ross came out of that start, in which his velocity ticked up, talking about how good he’d felt on the mound in his previous few outings, and how much it helped to be getting to start on a consistent basis.

“I mean, definitely helps being on every fifth day with no skips, and things like that,” Ross said, “... but overall physically I feel really good, feel like my mechanics are clean, and not like searching really for one specific move in my delivery, out of the stretch and out of the wind-up everything feels pretty good, so just kind of going out there and competing and not really thinking about anything else besides that.”

As his manager often says though, it’s all about how a pitcher feels in the days after a start, when they begin to build back up for the next turn in the rotation, and during that process, Ross felt something was off.

“He felt a little tight in his forearm,” Martinez said before Thursday’s series finale with the San Diego Padres in Petco Park. “He has a little inflammation in his right forearm, so as we talked before with him not pitching all of last year, we just want to be very cautious and keep an eye on this thing. So, we put him on the IL to get some of the swelling down, and hopefully it’s just one start that he misses. So, we’ll see what happens. He saw the doctor yesterday, he wasn’t very concerned about it, so we’ll just see how he progresses here in the next 10 days.”

As Martinez mentioned, he has talked since Spring Training about watching Ross and even Stephen Strasburg closely this year after both were limited in 2020, Ross, after opting out of playing in the 60-game COVID campaign, and Strasburg after he was injured. But this is not some way of skipping Ross going into the All-Star break to limit his innings.

“No, honestly this was not planned,” Martinez explained.

“This is something that, like I said, he said he threw his bullpen, he said his forearm felt funny and he did have some inflammation. We were hoping we’d get another start from him before the break, but because of the All-Star break, he has a chance to rest and recuperate and hopefully we get him back after the break.”

The plan for Ross, he said, is fairly simple.

“He’s going to rest right now and then like I said, we’ll see how he feels here in the next few days.”

On the year, Ross, 28, who underwent Tommy John surgery in July of 2017, has a 4.02 ERA, a 4.53 FIP, 28 walks, 91 Ks, and a .234/.306/.407 line against in 16 starts and 87 ¹⁄₃ IP.