If you missed today’s game, but went to check the box score, you might be confused to see Mike Montgomery’s final line: 0.0 IP, 0H, 0ER, 0BB, 0Ks. Sure, we’ve all seen pitchers have eventless performances before, but c’mon, right? Well, no not so much.
Montgomery was called in to replace Cole Hamels, who had a very tough day, in the fifth, but was lifted before he even threw a single warmup pitch. From an outside perspective, it was a pretty weird occurrence, because you’d think whatever was bothering him would’ve come up in the bullpen, but other than a few stray Tweets like this one …
Montgomery was coming out to start the fifth and now the trainer and Maddon are out talking to him. They're looking at his hand, it appears. He's coming out of the game. Looks like Kyle Ryan is warming.
— Sahadev Sharma (@sahadevsharma) May 27, 2019
… we didn’t have much to go on.
But we’re now a few innings later and Len Kasper has since reported on air that Montgomery left the game with “left middle finger discomfort.” He noted, specifically, that it was NOT a blister, but rather just general discomfort of some kind. Others have now shared the same. We’ll update you as we hear more, but obviously Montgomery plays a disproportionately big role in an already weak bullpen, so you hope this isn’t anything serious.
This has not been a fun couple of days to be a Cubs fan.