PHOENIX -- Merrill Kelly gave the D-backs the innings they were looking for Tuesday night in their 2-1 win over the Padres.

The victory was the eighth in the past nine games for the surging D-backs. They remain 3 1/2 games behind the Cubs, who currently hold the second National League Wild Card spot.

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Kelly (10-13) allowed just three hits and two walks, while striking out nine over seven innings.

That innings total was big for the D-backs. In 11 games entering Tuesday, the only starter to go six or more innings in a game was Mike Leake, who did it twice during that stretch. That had taxed Arizona's bullpen and left manager Torey Lovullo imploring his pitchers to find a way to get deeper into games.

So with Kelly sitting at 94 pitches through six innings, Lovullo sent him back out for the seventh and told him to approach the leadoff hitter like it would be his final one of the game.

But once Kelly retired Ty France, Lovullo left him in and he wound up retiring the side on just eight pitches.

“We’ve been grinding going to our bullpen,” Lovullo said. “And we’ve got 10 guys down there, but they’re all been used. For us to get that extra inning out of him, that was pretty impressive when you’re a little bit fatigued. ... He got up there and made pitches, and finished it off. To give us seven innings at a time when we really needed it, we’ll take it.”

Kelly was well aware of the need to deliver innings and was determined to do so.

“Any time you can notch another inning on your belt for that game, that just means that it’s one less bullpen arm that didn’t have to throw, and a lot less pitches that had to come from that end of the game,” Kelly said.

It was Kelly’s best outing in quite some time. In fact, after he allowed six runs in 4 1/3 innings against the Brewers on Aug. 23, the D-backs seriously considered taking him out of the rotation.

Lovullo, though, had a conversation with Kelly and decided that he would leave him in. Kelly knows that each of the last two times out, he was essentially pitching for his starting spot.

“I can’t worry about it,” Kelly said. “When I start worrying about it, that’s when bad things happen. That’s when my focus is off of executing pitches and going out every day and trying to get better. When you start focusing on things that you can’t control, that’s when things start going downhill. Obviously, we’ve had conversations and there’s obviously knowledge that that could happen, or that was a possibility, but I’ve just tried to do my best to kind of block all that out and just go about my business.”

During their meeting, one of the things Lovullo stressed to Kelly was that he wanted the rookie right-hander to sequence his pitches better and be more aggressive with his fastball, or in Lovullo’s words, have “fastball presence.”

Right from the first pitch, Tuesday, Kelly seemed to challenge Padres batters with his heater.

“He was pounding the zone, and I think the Padres felt that presence,” Lovullo said. “From there, it was the secondary stuff. He threw all sorts of secondary stuff -- a cutter, two-seamer, he had a lot of pitches working very well today. It’s sequencing, it’s consistency of pitching, landing pitches and then the fastball presence that I felt.”