Cards' starter Jaime Garcia lands back on the DL; may need surgery

Jaime Garcia made the start for the Cardinals on Friday night in St. Louis' 7-6 win in the opener of the three game weekend series against Ryan Braun and the last place Milwaukee Brewers -- but less than 48 hours later, he finds himself back on the 15-day disabled list with the best solution being the surgery that he held off on getting last season.

Through the first three innings of the game, Garcia retired all nine batters that he had seen and was cruising along as his stuff looked possibly the best that we have seen it all season. The next three innings of him on the mound though, weren't exactly what anybody would have expected -- but it happened indeed.

Brewers' slugger Aramis Ramirez hit two home runs, both being three-run shots, as he connected on one of them in the top half of the fourth inning and the other in the top half of the sixth inning. After Aramis hit the bomb in the sixth, it was the end of the night for Garcia -- and ultimately could have been his last batter faced for quite a while -- with the worst case scenario being that it could be the end of his 2013 regular-season campaign.

Unfortunately for Jaime, who said in a postgame interview that the pain in his shoulder was real intense and had him thinking about taking himself out of the game on numerous occassions, battled shoulder problems just about all season long last year. He got placed on the 15 day disabled-list on Sunday morning with a left shoulder strain, while veteran reliever Mitchell Boggs got recalled from Class AAA Memphis to fill in his spot on the roster.

An MRI was ran on Garcia on Saturday morning and the results aren't very appealling for Jaime or the Cardinals front office. When they compared last seasons' MRI results on the same shoulder to the results of Saturdays', Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak reported that the two look very, very similar.

While Jaime is set up to see Doctor James Andrews sometime within the next couple of days, with the same exact injury last season, he missed a little over two months as he insisted that he wanted to rehab the shoulder rather than having it surgically repaired. With the results coming back being almost the same as that injury though, the surgery seems to be about the only outcome to get it back to being better.

We will certainly find out a lot more information before the end of the week once he actually visits the doctors though, so for now, hope is the only thing that Garcia and the Cardinals can have. Before the injury, Jaime had given up 11 runs in his last 11 innings of work, but is 5-2 with a 3.58 earned run average.