Mike Foltynewicz’s roller-coaster season may be over.
Braves manager Brian Snitker said he’s still hopeful Foltynewicz gets one more outing, but that’s up in the air.
“I don’t know that it’s guaranteed, but I’m hoping that he can,” Snitker said. “I’d like for him to do that. We’ll just have to keep working towards that end, and hopefully we don’t run out of time.”
Foltynewicz has been nursing a lacerated finger that forced an early exit from his last start in Washington on Sept. 14. He missed his scheduled start Wednesday, and will miss his turn on Monday in New York.
“It’s something that, when it happened we were hoping for a quick recovery just because the skin needed to die off,” Foltynewicz said. “We’re getting right to the point where it’s starting to die off and we’re throwing with it without a band aid, but it’s starting to catch, starting to pull. So we don’t want to go into a game where we don’t know where the ball’s going.”
Foltynewicz’s next scheduled slot is Sept. 30 in Miami, but the team won’t necessarily stick to that, per Snitker.
“He said he was rubbing the ball. It gets dry and as he was throwing it ripped open,” Snitker said. “It’s kind of deep. It wasn’t a little paper cut. It was something that, in talking to the trainers about it, they prefaced it with ‘I don’t think he’ll need a stitch.’ It was big enough, that’s the thing.”
If that wraps Foltynewicz’s season, it ended in a thud. After a 14-start streak in which Foltynewicz accrued a 3.56 ERA, he was tagged for 20 runs in his next three outings. He was slowly stabilizing with quality starts against Colorado, Chicago and Miami before Washington. Even with the better statistical results, Foltynewicz lost his last seven starts.
Foltynewicz wants to finish on a more positive note, but the risk may outweigh the reward.
“We’re just trying to take it day-by-day,” Foltynewicz said. “It’s looking better day-by-day, just starting to throw 100 percent it’s going to cause problems and you don’t want to start from scratch again, rehab, this whole thing over the offseason. So we’ll take it day-by-day and hopefully try to get one more in. If not, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
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