Brewers' Matt Garza leaves start with left oblique strain

Brewers starter Matt Garza left Sunday's 3-2 loss to the Cardinals after six shutout innings with a left oblique strain.

Brewers starter Matt Garza left Sunday's 3-2 loss to the Cardinals after six shutout innings with a left oblique strain, the team announced.

Garza allowed only one hit in his six innings and struck out four, but the bullpen faltered in the seventh inning. The 30-year-old tweaked the oblique on the second-to-last pitch of the sixth.

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“Hopefully, it’s not bad. But it was bad enough where I had to take myself out of the game, and I don’t do that,” Garza told Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after the game. “I had to look at long-term more than short-term. I could have kept on and made it worse, and then could have been out probably the rest of the year. I had to go with the smart play. It’s one of those things where you don’t like it and don’t understand it.”

Garza had a left oblique strain with the Cubs in 2013, which caused him to miss the first seven weeks of the season, Haudricourt reports.

“This one’s not as bad as the last one, so that’s the positive out of it,” Garza said. “But it still sucks. It just felt like a muscle grab. They know they dodged a bullet with that one.”

Garza is 7-7 with a 3.74 ERA in 22 starts this season, his first with the Brewers after two with the Twins, three with the Rays, two-plus with the Cubs and one-plus with Texas.

Matt Garza left today's game with a left oblique strain.

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) August 3, 2014

- Chris Mascaro