Cardinals Starter Miles Mikolas Shut Down for Another Month Following PRP Injection

For one Cardinals starter, Spring Training may never get properly underway.

Miles Mikolas, following a step back from his star-making 2018 campaign, was still an innings eater in '19, soaking up 184 innings of 4.16-ERA baseball.

This year, however, those league-average innings may be harder to come by for the Cards, causing a few dominos to fall. Mikolas received a platelet injection on Tuesday to improve his sore right flexor tendon, which will bump his progress another month into the future.

In mid-March, he'll be reevaluated, though "ramping up" to pitching at that point would indicate he'd likely miss about a month of regular season action, taking his own approach to pseudo-Spring Training.

Without Mikolas in place, the lesser members of the Cardinals' rotation depth chart step up another level, with Triple-A pieces like Daniel Ponce de Leon and Austin Gomber potentially getting a crack at things, and recent import Kwang-Hyun Kim likely getting ample unexpected Spring Training opportunities.

Ideally, Mikolas' tenderness is solved by this shot and he's able to leap forward over the next month instead of hanging back.