Aramis Garcia waited years for consistent playing time in the Major Leagues, so he tried everything over the past week to avoid a stint on the 10-day injured list with a badly bruised left middle finger.
The pain finally became too much Thursday. During the first game of the Cincinnati Reds’ doubleheader against Pittsburgh, Garcia aggravated his finger injury when he mishandled a changeup from Luis Cessa in the seventh inning.
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There was a runner on third base, and Garcia moved quickly enough to prevent the runner from attempting to score, but there was no mistaking the pain he felt. He winced and shook his left hand as he walked back behind the plate. Home-plate umpire Angel Hernandez recognized Garcia was in a lot of pain and gave him some extra time.
Garcia caught another inning before he was removed for a pinch-hitter. He was placed on the 10-day IL between games in the doubleheader and will be sidelined through the All-Star break.
“It was hurting pretty bad,” Garcia said. “It was just getting to the point where I just felt like I was causing more harm than good. Not really do anybody justice by getting it good enough to play and then going out there aggravating it and not being able to hit or catch. It was just time to let it heal.”
Garcia initially injured his finger on a catcher’s interference in Chicago. Typically, that happens when a hitter grazes the catcher’s mitt on a late swing. The swing that injured Garcia went so deep into his mitt that the bat whacked his finger, which surprised him because he wasn’t crouched close to the batter’s box.
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He was out of the lineup for four consecutive games to rest it. He wore extra padding in his catcher’s mitt. When he hit, he tried to keep his finger off the bat because of how much it hurt when there was pressure on the sides of his finger.
“With Tyler (Stephenson) coming back and the All-Star break coming up, I was really just trying to grind to get there,” Garcia said. “It’s frustrating, for sure. We were just thinking of it too, it would really be unfortunate if we get to the All-Star break, you take the four days, and then afterward I’m still not right. I think it’s just better to take care of it now.”
Garcia, who started two games after June 29, had days where his finger felt better than others. It was a little sore Thursday afternoon, but the Reds needed him to catch at least one game of the doubleheader.
The soreness in his finger held up fine all game until Cessa’s changeup aggravated the pain in the seventh inning. More than four hours after it happened, it was swollen and discolored, black and blue.
“He’s in severe pain,” manager David Bell said. “I saw it after the game, and I don’t know how he got through the game. It was very discolored.”
Said Garcia: “It was pretty messed up.”
The injury was tough timing for Garcia. He ended June in his best offensive stretch of the season, delivering 11 hits in 27 at-bats (.407 batting average) in his final 11 games of the month. Tyler Mahle lauded his game-calling skills after Mahle pitched nine scoreless innings in an extra-innings win in Arizona, and he's made some big plays with his arm.
He wore a splint over his finger Thursday night “to stop the bending, give the ligaments a chance to heal,” he said. He plans to remain active with some baseball activities, so he’s ready to return once the pain subsides in his finger.
“He did everything he could to try and play through that,” Bell said. “Maybe I should have taken it out of his hands earlier but there’s a lot to be said for what he tried to do, and I didn’t want to take that away from him.”
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