Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina sprained his thumb last night on an awkward slide into third base. He underwent an to determine the severity of the injury. The verdict: severe. Molina has a torn ligament in his right thumb. He will have surgery and will miss 8-12 weeks, the team announced a few minutes ago.
Molina was hitting .287/.341/.409 with 16 doubles and seven home runs when he went down. That’s off the pace of where he’s been the past couple of years, but it’s still excellent production, and that’s before you factor in the fact that he is, bar none, the best catcher in all of baseball. This is a tremendous blow for the Cardinals, who have had the luxury of Molina’s outstanding work, almost uninterrupted, for the past decade.
In his place: Tony Cruz and Audry Perez. At least for now. If the Cardinals are looking to get a veteran presence to take Molina’s place or back either Cruz or Perez up, both John Buck and A.J. Pierzynski were DFA’d this week.
Not that either of them are a substitute for Yadi. Heck, you could stack all four of those guys on top of one another and they wouldn’t measure up to Yadi.