Joe Nathan to Have MRI on Elbow

On Saturday afternoon, Minnesota Twins closer Joe Nathan left the team's game against the Boston Red Sox after feeling some tightness in his surgically repaired throwing elbow. The move was made for nothing more than precautionary reasons, as there's no point risking your closer during a spring training game in the first week of March.

Unfortunately, when Nathan showed up in the Twins clubhouse on Sunday morning, the tightness and soreness in his elbow had yet to sort itself out. So now, as another precautionary measure, Nathan is on his way back to the Twin Cities to have an MRI performed on the elbow.

"Everything is looking good, as it not being super serious," Nathan said. "As far as tears or anything, it doesn't look like it's anything like that. That's a positive, and I'm going up there with positive thoughts. But we definitely want to be precautionary and make sure that we have all the information we could gather to at least give us peace of mind and know that hopefully nothing is going on."

The Twins are hoping that the discomfort Nathan is feeling is nothing more than scar tissue breaking up following the procedure he had on Oct. 20 to remove bone spurs and other loose bodies from the elbow.

Nathan said that he's going to take the next few days off, and hopefully this is all just one of the speed bumps in the road to recovery from the original elbow surgery. No doubt the Twins feel the same way, because if the MRI comes back showing a more significant injury that would keep Nathan out for an extended period of time, it would have a large impact on the team's performance this season.