Baseball: It's a Broken Thumb

Baseball America is reporting that the injury is indeed a broken thumb:

Michigan junior outfielder Ryan LaMarre, a third-team preseason All-American, will miss four to five weeks with a broken thumb, Wolverines coach Rich Maloney told Baseball America this afternoon. LaMarre suffered the injury saturday, when he dove for a ball in the outfield and landed funny. Maloney said it was a clean fracture, so LaMarre should not be affected long-term.

"It's a tough blow for everybody," Maloney said. "It's not fun having your star player out when you're playing the toughest schedule you've ever played—you can't replace what he brings. It is what it is; we'll go back in and claw and battle and fight, and he'll be back for Big Ten play."

This, well, this sucks. It goes on to discuss the same left field by committee I've mentioned previously, with primary backup first baseman Garrett Stephens looking like the first option so far.

  That's landing on the thumb

The loss will be huge with the BigTen/BigEast Challenge, the UNC series, and the Coastal tournament over the next three weekends.If the five week schedule holds in place, that makes him available for the opening weekend of BigTen play. From there, it's a question on how effective he'll be after that long of a time off.

For those of you who paid attention last year, this is quite similar to the Berset injury suffered sliding head first into second base. Berset broke his thumb in the second weekend of the season at Jacksonville (March 1) and would not return until April 15. That's close to what we're looking at right now.

(Both screen grabs taken from Texas Tech's stream of the game)