The Dodgers appear to have another pitching injury on their hands.
In the second inning of Friday’s game against the Arizona Diamondbacks, veteran left-hander Clayton Kershaw exited in the second inning because of what the team later said was left big toe pain.
No further information on the severity of the issue was immediately available.
Kershaw, 36, had struggled early in Friday’s contest, giving up two runs in the first before surrendering a solo home run to Corbin Carroll on his final throw in the second inning.
That last pitch was a 67.4 mph curveball, which registered as one of the slowest pitches of Kershaw’s career.
Before Carroll had even finished rounding the bases, manager Dave Roberts and head athletic trainer Thomas Albert came out to the mound to remove Kershaw from the game.
Relief pitcher Joe Kelly had already begun warming up in the bullpen at the start of the inning, as well, suggesting that Kershaw perhaps alerted team officials to the problem after the first.
A 17-year veteran, three-time Cy Young Award winner and future Hall of Famer, Kershaw was making only his seventh start of the season Friday, having missed the first three and a half months of the campaign recovering from offseason shoulder surgery.
He joins a long list of injured Dodgers pitchers — most notably rotation aces Tyler Glasnow (elbow) and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (shoulder).
Yamamoto and Glasnow both played catch pregame Friday.
For Yamamoto, it was a standard session as he prepares for his second minor-league rehab outing next week. He could return from his strained rotator cuff as soon as the team’s next homestand.
For Glasnow, the catch session represented the restart of a throwing program that had been delayed by lingering discomfort caused by his elbow tendinitis injury. He is scheduled to play catch again on Saturday, as he attempts to make a return before the end of the season.
