Cardinals starter Jaime Garcia returned to St. Louis Tuesday to undergo an magnetic resonance imaging on his left elbow after informing the club of discomfort following his start against the Philadelphia Phillies on Saturday.
General manager John Mozeliak confirmed that an MRI taken Wednesday morning came back negative but that the lefty would miss his scheduled start Friday against the New York Mets.
"It appears that everything is fine but we're going to skip his start Friday and hopefully he will pitch sometime next week for us," Mozeliak said. "He's been kind of feeling it a little bit. It was not an acute injury of any sort. It was just not feeling 100 percent.
"You never want to send out a player to play if they don't feel right and the key thing is we just wanted to make sure that we weren't putting him in a position where he may hurt himself more and that was what we wanted to clarify."
The Cardinals will instead bump up the other four starters thanks to Thursday's off day and hope to slide Garcia back into the rotation next Tuesday in Houston.
The 6-2 lefthander allowed four earned runs on six hits and two walks in six innings Saturday against the Phillies. He threw 91 pitches and has been held below 100 pitches in all but one of his starts this year.
"He was just a little more sore than normal so we took the proactive measure of trying to get him looked at to make sure we were ahead of it if there was something going on," said manager Mike Matheny on the FOX Sports Midwest pregame show. "It looks like it's just going to be a setback for a little while."
Garcia had Tommy John surgery late in the 2008 season but returned to the mound late in 2009 and became a 13-game winner in 2010. He went 13-7 with a 3.56 ERA in 2011 while throwing a career high 194 2/3 innings.
Counting an additional 25 2/3 innings covered over five playoff starts, Garcia's 220 1/3 innings last year were more than 50 innings greater than his previous single-season high in professional baseball.
The 25-year-old Garcia is 3-3 with a 3.78 ERA in 10 starts this year. In 64 1/3 innings, he's allowed 73 hits and has 49 strikeouts.
The Cardinals have been hit hard by injuries the first two months of the season. Ace Chris Carpenter has yet to throw a pitch while dealing with a nerve issue in his shoulder and relievers Kyle McClellan and Scott Linebrink remain on the disabled list as well.
Lance Berkman is out until around August 1 after undergoing knee surgery while Allen Craig, Jon Jay and Matt Carpenter are also currently on the DL.
Craig, who missed the first month of the season due to offseason knee surgery and then returned to the disabled list with a hamstring strain two weeks later, expects to be activated Friday night in New York.
Jay was rehabbing at the Cardinals spring training complex in Jupiter, Fla., but Mozeliak told FOX Sports Midwest that he's still feeling discomfort and will get a second opinion on his shoulder Thursday.
"I would say it's concerning, but I'm optimistic," Mozeliak said. "Basically we just feel like we've kind of exhausted everything we can do so we thought it would be helpful to get someone else's opinion.
"It's still something that's bothering him so we've got to try and get him over the hump."
Jay was eligible to come off the disabled list Wednesday.
