C. Trent Rosecrans

crosecrans@enquirer.com

Yadier Molina hasn’t had the best luck of throwing Billy Hamilton out on the bases, but he does get an assist in getting Hamilton out of Sunday’s game.

Hamilton suffered a left oblique injury in the Reds’ loss to the Cardinals, suddenly injuring the muscle during his third-inning at-bat. Hamilton would have stayed in the game and perhaps suffered further damage if it weren’t for the Cardinals’ catcher looking out for him, Hamilton said on Tuesday.

“I started to get back in the box, but Yadi was actually the one who stopped the play,” Hamilton said on Tuesday. “I’m sitting over there and he looked me in the eye. I didn’t want show any reaction or whatever, but I knew I was feeling something that wasn’t normal. It’s something you have to take care of. You don’t want to deal with something like that because it could get worse.”

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Teammates Zack Cozart and Joey Votto also urged Hamilton to leave the game so that he wouldn’t aggravate the injury further.

Once he did leave the game and went to the training room, he got a quick lesson on how bad the injury could be.

“I was in the training room right after it happened, and I sneezed and it was the worst pain ever,” Hamilton said. “I was like, ‘How do you sneeze and you feel it down here? Something really ain’t right. I didn’t like that.’”

Hamilton won’t resume baseball activities the rest of this week, but he did say he’s starting to feel better.

“I’ve rested a little bit and haven’t done too much with it,” he said. “With all the icing and stuff, it feels a lot better than what it did. I can still feel the pain. It’s still tough for me to laugh or cough or sneeze. I never knew that when you sneeze it would hurt down there.”