PITTSBURGH -- Just minutes before the start of Wednesday's game against the Diamondbacks, the Pirates announced that second baseman Freddy Sanchez will be undergoing minor arthroscopic surgery on his right shoulder on Friday.

The surgery, which will be performed by Dr. Patrick DeMeo at Allegheny General Hospital, is expected to take just 15 minutes and will clean up the area around Sanchez's right shoulder cuff.

Sanchez has battled soreness in that right shoulder for the better part of two seasons, including a 2006 campaign that saw him claim the National League batting title. The second baseman said the discomfort first flared up about the time Spring Training started last season and was initially most bothersome when he lifted weights. Since then though, it has been something he's had to deal with on the field as well.

Frequent cortisone shots have tamed the pain since then, but when Sanchez woke up in the early hours on Wednesday morning, the pain reached a point that dictated the need for a long-term solution.

"It kind of got worse the last couple of days," Sanchez said. "This is something that got worse in the middle of the night. Maybe I tweaked something after the game or during the game, that I didn't feel, and I woke up in quite a bit of pain.

"It was one of those things that got so [much] worse that I couldn't play, and that bothered me. It's unfortunate, because I wanted to finish this week out and finish strong and finish on a high note. I tried to play through it, but it was just one of those things where I couldn't."

Sanchez had an MRI on the AC joint in that right shoulder on Tuesday, which fortunately revealed nothing structurally wrong in the area of his rotator cuff. However, when the pain increased overnight, the medical staff determined no reason for Sanchez to push himself to play the final five games of the year.

"The training staff has done a great job of managing it and Freddy's done a great job of playing through it," said Pirates general manager Neal Huntington. "It was something that we anticipated having to get done at the end of the season, that flared up more. There's no sense waiting any longer."

The good news is that because of the minor nature of the surgery, Sanchez will be fully functional within 6-8 weeks. And by taking care of the problem this early, Sanchez's offseason workout program will not be affected, and he will be ready to take the field when Spring Training begins in February.

The doctors on the Pirates' medical staff weren't the only doctors that Sanchez visited on Wednesday. Before arriving at PNC Park, Sanchez also met with an eye doctor to have his right eye examined. The second baseman had been forced out of Tuesday's game, not because of pain in his right arm, but due to a recurring vision problem with his right eye.

"He said the eye's perfectly fine," Sanchez reported after the visit. "I saw the doctor a while ago for the same thing, and they said it could just be allergy where it could just get a little glare and blurry under the lights. Every now and then, it just gets a little irritated."

However, there is somewhat of an unsettling correlation between Sanchez's on-again-off-again vision problem and something that he dealt with back in April. The periodic blurriness has been an issue that the second baseman has fought since a foreign object -- said to be a small piece of metal -- entered his eye back in April and had to be removed.

As has been the case since that April incident, Sanchez will continue using eye drops to try and remedy the problem.

"I've never had any problems with my eyes," Sanchez said. "Ever since that day, it's been acting up. It's kind of frustrating, because it's nothing you can control."