Nelson is the only member of that group to spend more than one season at Arizona. The Snakes claimed the 29-year-old reliever off waivers from Cleveland during the 2021-2022 offseason. Nelson pitched a 2.19 ERA in 43 appearances during his first season in the desert. His numbers dipped in 2023 and he wasn’t much of a factor over the last two seasons. Nelson missed most of the ’24 campaign due to thoracic outlet syndrome. He played just three games in the big league, while allowing more than one run per inning in 42 Triple-A games this year.
Curtiss signed a minor league contract with the Snakes this offseason. They called him at the end of June. He threw 36 2/3 innings across 30 MLB appearances. Curtiss posted a respectable 3.93 ERA, but struck out only 17% of the batters he faced. The 32-year-old right-hander has a 4.03 ERA over 145 1/3 innings over parts of eight seasons. This amounts to an early non-tender instead of a projected arbitration salary of $1.2 million.
Kelly and Kaiser were given cups of coffee as a stopgap at the end of the season. The 36-year-old Kelly pitched a pair of games in August, throwing a single and a walk in 1 2/3 scoreless innings. He spent most of the year working in the rotation at Triple-A Reno, pitching to a 5.63 ERA with a well-below average strikeout rate of 11.5% over 115 innings. Kaiser, who turns 29 in a few weeks, played in 11 games after signing his contract in August. He picked up his first two major league shots. The Vanderbilt product is a glove-only middle infielder who hit .236/.345/.406 with a 27.5% strikeout rate in Triple-A.
The cuts allow Arizona’s 40-man roster to meet tomorrow’s deadline. Teams must recover all players from the 60-day injured list by Thursday. The D-Backs had 44 players, including those coming off the injured list.
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