St. Louis Cardinals’ Matt Holliday Going on DL with Fractured Thumb

Matt Holliday’s season could be over after he exited Thursday’s game with a hand injury.

The St. Louis Cardinals announced after Thursday night’s loss to the Chicago Cubs that outfielder/first baseman Matt Holliday suffered a fractured right thumb. Holliday was hit with a Mike Montgomery fastball in the 10th inning of the extra-inning loss, and he exited immediately, being replaced by Jeremy Hazelbaker.

Holliday will join Aledmys Diaz, Jhonny Peralta, Matt Carpenter, Matt Adams, Tommy Pham, Brandon Moss, Brayan Peña, and Ruben Tejada as position players who have spent time on the Cardinals’ DL this year. As he heads to the DL, there will be just three position players from the Cards’ Opening Day lineup who have not spent time either on the DL or in the minors this year: Yadier Molina, Jedd Gyorko, and Stephen Piscotty.

Holliday was in the midst of arguably a career-worst season–he had a solid but unspectacular .242/.318/.450 slash line–but he had a good chance to surpass his previous season-high in home runs as a Cardinal (28), as he’d hit 19 homers through 107 games.

With the 36-year-old out, there will be more opportunities for Moss, Pham, Hazelbaker, and Randal Grichuk to contribute alongside Piscotty in the outfield. If the Cards use some combination of Moss, Carpenter, Gyorko, Peralta, and/or Greg Garcia in the infield, it could also create a renewed opportunity for Kolten Wong to contribute in the outfield.

Next: Cardinals Recall Grichuk, Place Adams on DL

If Holliday misses the rest of the season with this injury (which he guessed he wouldn’t on Thursday night), it’s possible that we’ve seen the last of him in a Cardinals uniform. The Cardinals can pay him $1 million to walk away in 2017, rather than paying him $17M to play next year, and with all the young outfielders that they’ve got right now, they may decide that they’re better off spending their money elsewhere.