Both Nomar Garciaparra and Andy LaRoche left today's game with wrist and/or hand injuries. Garciaparra was hit on the hand by some Cardinal pitcher named McClellan and in the bottom of the inning LaRoche dove to catch a bad throw from Danny Ardoin, was hit on the wrist, and immediately left the game. Nomar is supposedly okay, no word on LaRoche.

Update [2008-3-7 21:9:24 by Andrew]: LaRoche is out 8-10 weeks with a torn ligament in his thumb. While I'm no expert in the matter, recent finger injuries to Julio Lugo and Coco Crisp have caused them to be terrible since. I'm sure there are some counter examples out there, but I don't know them off the top of my head.

The only other example of LaRoche's injury I could find was Pokey Reese in 1998. Reese was never any good after the injury, but I doubt he would have been useful injury or no.