Padres place ace Yu Darvish on injured list

The Padres announced Wednesday that they’ve placed righty Yu Darvish on the 15-day injured list due to a tightness in his neck and recalled right-handed reliever Logan Gillaspie from Triple-A El Paso in his place. Darvish’s IL placement is retroactive to April 15.

Darvish had been slated to take the ball for San Diego on Saturday but will be sidelined until at least April 30. The team hasn’t provided further details on the injury or given a timetable for the length of his expected absence. The Friars also haven’t listed a replacement starter for Saturday yet, though they have an off day Thursday which could allow them to move everyone else up a day for the time being without starting someone on short rest.

In five starts this season, the veteran Darvish has pitched 23 2/3 innings and notched a 4.18 ERA. He’s sitting on an uncharacteristically low strikeout rate (21.9%) and a high walk rate (9.9%). Darvish’s most recent start against the Dodgers, wherein he yielded three runs and fanned just two in five innings, saw his average fastball drop more than a mile per hour relative to his season debut.

With Darvish shelved for a yet-to-be-determined period of time, the Padres will lean even more heavily on the trio of Joe Musgrove, Dylan Cease and Michael King. 27-year-old knuckleballer Matt Waldron has pitched well through three starts but has a minimal track record in the big leagues. Other rotation options on the 40-man roster include righties Jhony Brito and Randy Vasquez and lefties Jackson Wolf and Jay Groome. Brito is already on the big league roster in a long-relief capacity. Groome has yet to pitch more than two innings in a Triple-A appearance this season. Wolf and Vasquez have been hit quite hard in their first looks of the ’24 season in El Paso.

The 37-year-old Darvish is in the second season of a six-year, $108M contract that runs through his age-41 season. That deal, which promised Darvish five years and an additional $90M on top of the final $18M he was owed under his prior contract, was engineered in many ways to tamp his luxury tax hit. The $90M in new money was closer to what one might expect for a then-36-year-old Darvish over a three-year term. He’d finished eighth in Cy Young balloting a season prior, rattling off 194 2/3 innings of 3.10 ERA ball. The Padres instead stretched what looked like three-year money out over an additional five years, weighing down the annual value and lessening the contract’s luxury hit in the process.