The Los Angeles Dodgers unexpectedly placed Hyun-Jin Ryu on the 10-day injured list Friday (retroactive to Aug. 1) due to lingering soreness in the right side of his neck.
Ryu got through six shutout innings at Coors Field on Wednesday and awoke the next morning experiencing the discomfort. “Didn’t think it was too serious but even towards the game time, I still felt it,” he said through an interpreter.
“So the team asked me to take a look at it with the doctor, and he told me how having this kind of discomfort might affect my mechanics, so I thought it was a good time take a break. I don’t think it’s something that’s too serious.”
Ryu said the discomfort is limited to just his neck area. When Ross Stripling was removed from a recent start because of a similar injury, it wound up spreading into his right shoulder and causing biceps tendinitis that’s landed him on the IL.
While Stripling is likely to miss multiple starts, Ryu expects only to not pitch in Monday’s series opener against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Dodgers have already recalled Tony Gonsolin, and he’s scheduled to start in place of Ryu.
“It’s just discomfort and soreness. It’s not like a pain, so I don’t expect it to be too long,” Ryu said of his time on the injured list.
This marks a second time a this season the 32-year-old has been sidelined by injury as he missed a brief stretch in April because of a groin strain. The groin and neck trouble are essentially all that’s slowed Ryu in what’s shaped to potentially be a Cy Young season.
He’s 11-2 with an MLB-best 1.66 ERA, to go along with a 0.94 WHIP in 21 starts. Though in some sense, Ryu could still stand to benefit from the time off.
He issued just five walks in 93 innings pitched through his first 14 starts of the year, but followed it by walking 11 batters in 42.2 innings over his last seven outings. Included in that stretch was twice issuing a season-high three walks.
