St. Louis Cardinals: Marcell Ozuna to miss time with finger injury

The St. Louis Cardinals will be without their slugging left fielder for at least ten days as he’s out with injury. Where do they go from here?

The St. Louis Cardinals have suffered another injury. In a bit of a freak accident, slugging outfielder Marcell Ozuna was injured on Friday night after diving back into the first base bag on a pickoff attempt. This was a bit of a freak injury and I can’t blame Ozuna for it happening, it’s just bad luck.

The injury bug hasn’t bit the Cardinals too bad this year, but this injury has taken the Cardinals best hitter out of their lineup. Ozuna currently has a slash line of .259/.331/.515 with 20 homers and 62 RBI’s. Ozuna was (and I guess still is) on pace to amass more than 100 RBI’s for the first time since 2017 and be the first Cardinals player to do that since way back in 2012 when Matt Holliday had 102 RBI’s.

It is unclear how long Ozuna will be out as the actual injury was small fractures in the base of his third and fourth fingers on his right hand but hopefully, it’s not much longer than the All-Star break.

In the wake of his injury, the St. Louis Cardinals announced on Saturday that Tyler O’Neill and Lane Thomas would be called up from Memphis as John Brebbia went on the paternity list for the birth of his child.

I wrote about how O’Neill was doing at AAA early on Saturday and more or less the answer was, “not as good as he should be doing” but we will see how he does when given some consistent playing time.

Lane Thomas got an audition earlier in the year with the Cardinals and showed very well with four hits (one homer) and four RBI’s in ten at-bats while playing very solid in centerfield. His .237 batting average at AAA is slightly troubling as that is paired with just a .379 slugging percentage as well.

He is coming off a year where he hit 27 homers between AA and AAA and in about 40% of the at-bats he had last year, Thomas has just 4 homers this year. With the way the team is playing at the moment though, I’m not concerned about anyone who is getting called up for attempted reinforcements.

At this point, the unknown triumphantly beats the known in this writer’s mind.

Regardless of when Ozuna does come back, he may not be the same hitter for a while as hand injuries can sap players’ hitting abilities (see Paul DeJong’s second half last year) so that’ll be interesting to see. This team just doesn’t have much going for it right now and it’s getting tiresome to try and remain optimistic.