Peralta Suffers Thumb Injury

The St. Louis Cardinals were dealt their first significant injury news of Spring Training on Monday as Jhonny Peralta is expected to miss a couple of months with torn thumb ligament.

Peralta suffered the injury on Saturday while ranging to his right for a ground ball. He showed discomfort after the play and Mozeliak confirmed an MRI was taken afterwards.

“The medical team feels like right now the news is not going to be good,” said Mozeliak during today’s game broadcast on Fox Sports Midwest. “It looks like the UCL has been compromised. From where we stand, he’ll get one more opinion on it tomorrow hopefully and then from there, we’ll make a decision what that next step looks like.”

The thumb ligament injury to Peralta is “bascially the same thing” that Yadier Molina suffered in September. Molina’s first surgery did not take, which required a second surgery and has him slowly easing back into Spring Training.

“I would speculate you’re looking at sometime in the middle of June, end of June when you could expect him to return,” said Mozeliak of Peralta’s situation. “A lot of it is, of course, on how therapy goes but the overall operation itself is not overly complicated.”

Jedd Gyorko started at shortstop today and both Greg Garcia and Aledmys Diaz are available for the position. But the question remains if any of those three can handle the position on an everyday basis til Peralta returns.

“I definitely think over the next week or so, that’s the question we’re going to be asked the most,” said Mozeliak. “Understanding what might be out there is something that we’re going to need a little time to determine,” answered Mozeliak. “I do think from an internal standpoint, obviously somebody like Jedd Gyorko is going to get a much longer look at short than previous. I also would imagine you’re going to see somebody like Diaz and Garcia also get ample opportunity. I do feel like we have some internal solutions, but my job is to also explore what’s out there so we’ll just take the next three to four weeks and try to determine what that might look like.”

“From an offensive standpoint, he would give us the close thing we have to replicating what Jhonny was producing. From a defensive standpoint, it’s a question I can’t answer yet. I think time will tell. The one thing is, in the past we’ve had that defensive replacement–that’s been the Pete Kozma’s of the world. Currently, we don’t have that in our system of that ilk. That’s something we have to determine if we want to go out and get or we like what we have.”

photo credit:  Scott Rovak-USA TODAY Sports